Too hot to handle: why high heat can hinder Raid recovery Efforts

Have you ever wondered what happens to your Raid data systems if they must withstand heat from a fire? The heat may be enough to cause the data on virtual drives to become irretrievable. But, it isn’t only the heat that can do the most damage to a hard disk drive. The film, from the smoke that sets on a hard disk drive, may make it hard to access information on the drive. What is the danger from even a little smoke? Smoke may cause circuit boards to short out prematurely because the smoke film coating acts as an insulator. It can cause components to overheat quickly and cause premature failure.

It isn’t only the smoke film that is dangerous. Particles in smoke are extremely corrosive and may cause oxidizing on a hard disk drive. Should a company buy equipment from a business that has had a fire? There is a danger in getting equipment that won’t function properly or be a reliable backup for data files because of excessive pitting and danger of overheating.

Could fires back the need for off-site data Recovery?

A business owner may have adequate equipment to back up daily files and also do incremental saves of data. If a business owner has four take backups off-site and one backup drive onsite, it may be a challenge for a trained professional to retrieve much-needed files. What is a little heat? The reality is that not every fire is the same, though all produce heat and smoke.

A small flame, a candle flame, can generate enough heat to be able to affect and even damage a hard drive. Pair this heat with a drive that is incrementally backed up and requires several other drives to restore data and this can be the beginnings of a recipe for disaster for any UK business. One UK business experienced first-hand the mistake of not having data backed up, after customers ordered tickets for events. After setting a backup drive to incremental, this meant that data on the master backup disk was needed to start the retrieval process for the other backup disks that were stored off-site. Did you know even a small fire is hot enough to “melt” any usable data in a hard drive.

Shouldn’t you have a data loss disaster plan in case the unthinkable happens? Have you ever had to have a data specialist recover data lost due to a fire?  We can help recover data lost because of hackers or is erased or a disaster.