Gerard Blokdijk

Disaster Recovery 100 Success Secrets - IT Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery planning and Services


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in itself, and then you have to pay to recover your data which is equally or even more expensive to pursue. But compared to the cost of lost business due to loss of trust by present and future clients, corporations may prefer to invest in good Critical Disaster Information Recovery service anyway.

      Critical Disaster Information Recovery will have better odds of being successful if the process is initiated in a timely manner. It

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      also helps if your organization had a very detailed and systematic Critical Disaster Information Recovery plan in place before any threats hit the organization later on.

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      Disaster Recovery Measures in the

      Data Center

      The data center holds all valuable information that the company needs to ensure business continuity. However, there are times wherein threats may come along the way, which may cause losing every bit of information that is considered critical to business operations. Such threats vary from natural to human-inflicted errors. There are also some who intentionally steal such data and use them for their own good. Hackers can easily penetrate the data center if information security is not taken seriously.

      Having these possibilities in mind, most companies have resorted to data center disaster recovery aside from the usual countermeasures that are implemented to lessen, if not totally avoid the presence of threats. There are actually two steps to consider in starting the much needed data center disaster recovery plan for your organization.

      When dealing with data center disaster recovery, the first step to think about is the acceptable loss that the company can endure. Say for example, if you are working in a financial institution, is an hour good enough to restore lost data without really impacting the whole operation of the business?

      Though there may be protection that you can rely on from database backups, determining this will definitely guide you on what to do when a threat present itself unexpectedly.

      The second step would be checking if loss of access rights to the database is still be feasible for users in carrying out their day to day duties. By knowing this, you will be able to devise a strategy that has minimal impact to the business and to its users, but still restoring valuable data lost due to threats can still be performed.

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      This may seem challenging but getting the right information is the key to successful disaster recovery plans.

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      Data Disaster Recovery D Restoring

      Information from Damaged Media

      Very critical data used in business operations are often saved in storage media such as DVDs, CDs, hard disk drives, flash disks and other electronic devices. However, due to unexpected file errors and physical damages, contents stored on these devices may become corrupted or inaccessible at times. The process of recovering lost data from these storage media is called data disaster recovery.

      Physical damages that usually happen on DVDs and CDs do not only cause loss of data but damage on the logical structure of the file system as well. Such damages may mean unrecovered data and thus, canOt be repaired anymore by an ordinary end user.

      Though technical experts can still salvage files stored on these devices through the use of Class 100 cleanroom facilities, this may be a bit costly. Another common recovery procedure is done by removing the damaged portion of the printed circuit board (PCB) and replace with another PCB from a healthy drive.

      This procedure is indeed highly technical in nature and thus, should only be done by experts to further protect the integrity of data stored on these damaged devices.

      Aside from physical damage, another common cause of data loss on storage devices is logical damage. Power outage is one of the reasons why logical damage happens, thus preventing the file system structure to overwrite or save files on the storage medium.

      System crashes, and problems with hardware and drivers may also cause logical damage. Because of this, most operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac have their own versions of repair tool used to recover data. Taking advantage of these tools

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      can definitely make data disaster recovery a bit easier than expected.

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      What Is Database Disaster Oracle

      Recovery?

      Created by Larry Ellison, Ed Oates and Bob Miner, the Software Development Laboratories in 1977 developed the original Oracle DBMS (or Database Management System.) The name Oracle is derived from the code of a project that they worked on at Ampex.

      Software Development Laboratories was then renamed to

      Relational Software Inc. (or RSI) in 1979 D which was later named Oracle Corporation in the year 1984.

      The two major components of an Oracle DBMS are Database and Instance. The Database contains all the control files; redo logs (that contain your data and Oracle metadata), and physical data files. The control files contain Oracle metadata which are very important and contain all the information that is needed to access the database. The redo log holds records for any changes that have been done.

      An Instance, however, is a combination of the background processes and the pool of physical memory called RAM allocated to Oracle. The RAM is also called System Global Area (or SGA.) The RAM is employed to cache data (since the RAM is a thousand times faster than I/O.)

      There are different types of backups, namely: whole Database Backup, Consistent Whole Database Backup, Inconsistent

      Whole Database, Inconsistent Closed Backups, Tablespace Backups, Datafile Backups, and Control File Backups. Each backup differs the others, and knowing which backup method should be used is essential.

      RMAN (or recovery manager) is a component that establishes a connection with a particular server process. The RMAN

      automates the flow of data for recovery operations and backup.

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      The OS (or Operating System) is another process but one where the database is backed up manually by a specific command execution to certain user specifications.

      The Oracle export Utility, however, makes backup logical by writing data from the Oracle database to OS files. The Oracle Enterprise Manager, on the other hand, runs with a GUI interface that brings Recovery Manager to work.

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      How to Survive Data Recovery Disaster

      Sometimes, even with a team of Data Recovery Disaster specialists on your side helping out, it may not be possible to foresee when Data Recovery Disaster will strike. Sometimes, it may seem like fate is playing a cruel joke on you and Data Recovery Disaster occurs despite your best efforts. Can you survive a Data Recovery Disaster event?

      If you are a business organization hit by a Data Recovery Disaster event, one thing you do not need is unwarranted publicity.

      This is because you need clients to think that they can trust you with their data and their business. This is why many corporations hire PR firms to ward off nosy reporters who only see the value of a potential story and do not see why corporations would want to shield themselves from publicity. Until you have found out what caused the a Data Recovery Disaster event to occur, it would be wise to keep the media at bay D once you know why the event happened and how you can prevent it and other threats from occurring, then you can safely talk to the press (but definitely not beforehand.)

      This means you have to exert all efforts to find out the true causes of the event. For instance, if your data storage facility was hit by a fire, you should always get an investigating team that specializes in fire damage to assess what the cause was. You might be unpleasantly surprised that arson could have been a factor D

      possibly motivated by business competition. Or, if it seems like someone downloaded a virus into the IT system accidentally,