On Thu, 14 Jun 2012 09:41:18 -0500, Karl Townsend
wrote:

On Thu, 14 Jun 2012 05:31:22 -0700, Larry Jaques
wrote:

On Thu, 14 Jun 2012 05:25:04 -0500, Karl Townsend
wrote:

We had a 'puter crash and lost a day's sales records and, more
imprtantly, payroll data.

I'm mounting the HD in a USB portable unit and putting in the freezer,
hoping to get one last spin.

Has that worked for you before?!


If that don't work, are there any other
good ideas? Otherwise, anybody know what a data recovery vendor costs
and any suggested vendor?

A local guy gets from $129-600 for recovery, depending on size and
importance of recovery. I guess he tries harder and longer on the
important stuff.

JOY, stuck dying drive in a USB portable case, then in freezer. it
fired up and i copied just a few K of data. A minute later i heard the
whirring squeak and it breathed its last gasp.

A fella on RCM said a cold drive will run a bit, sometimes.

Karl

If the information is THAT mission critical, a desktop class machine
isn't going to do it alone, even with mirrored drives - you need to go
to something far more robust like an AIX Unix based machine running a
Journaled File System.

The Data Recovery Services that tear the dead hard drive down in a
Clean Room and put the platters in a good donor drive to get the
information off are going to charge you over a grand for that service
- sometimes several grand, and no guarantees of success.

For one day's sales data you might be better off just doing the
reconstruction the hard way, from the paper timecards, the Truck
shipping Bills Of Lading and UPS shipment records, and the paper
copies of the day's invoices. You *do* make paper copies for just
this reason, right?

If you don't, see what you can recover from the Cloud and the
customers who placed orders that day. Your e-mails and other things
will still be on the servers and can be rebuilt.

Dig the carbons out of the trash can and hold them up to the light.
Get out the cash register journal tape and glean what you can from
that - at least you can get the totals, and back-figure sales from
that.

Call the credit card clearinghouse and get copies of everything they
did before they do the 72-hour purge to prevent ID Theft. It's like a
Jigsaw Puzzle, once the pattern emerges it'll all fall into place.

Get started now, then you can check all the source info you collected
against the other pieces of the puzzle and/or against the hard drive
contents if they do get it back.

There are a few customers who will (given that option) say "No, we
only ordered one dozen bushels yesterday, not one gross!" - but those
are the kinds of customers you really didn't want to do business with
anyway. Lose their phone number, and develop amnesia if they come
back looking for another fantastic deal like that.

The honest ones will help you get the records rebuilt and make things
right with you even if you can't prove it from your end.

-- Bruce --