sobrique | Recovered data

One of the things I deal with, day to day, is our backup and restore infrastructure. Every day, we take a copy of anything that's changed, and save it on a tape, in our 1000 tape slot library. Each tape is 400-800Gb, so that's actually rather a lot of data we store.

We have a good helpdesk team, who mostly field the restore requests directly, either by restoring from shadowcopy (snapshotted point in time copies of the filesystem) or through the backup software themselves.

However, that doesn't always work, at which point it gets to me. Well, us. One of the hardest conversations to have with someone, is when their data cannot be restored. I still feel that stab of horror, when the file that they're requesting, as actually really rather urgently hugely vital, is just not 'there' on our backup indexes.

Now, there's a variety of reasons why that can happen. Occasionally a server wasn't backed up properly one evening. Much much more often it's because the user isn't actually sure what file it is, or where it is, or haven't realised that files that they've cleverly (because it's fasters) stored on their laptop, just aren't backed up.

None the less, it's still... well always difficult, having a conversation with someone about why that really vital data is Just Gone, and how no, there is no way they are getting it back, and gradually it dawns on them, that no, actually I mean it. No amount of wheedling, shouting, corporate bullying, or crying (that's only happened once) will mean I am able to alter time and recover data that was never backed up.

I try to help. Really, I do. I'll go as far as searching through indexes, for possible matches on files of approximately the right size and type, but really, if it's not where you thought it was, chances are it's not anywhere else, either.