Gillware (Data Recovery Company) Failed To Recovery My Data
Aug 28, 2007
My host just recently sent the hard drive with my sites to a data recovery company called Gillware. Website is [url]- but they failed and gave the following reason:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gillware
Unfortunately, your file system was so severely damaged that no data can be
recovered. We will make arrangements to return your drive via UPS. Sorry
we could not help you further.
Gillware Inc.
Do you guys think there's still hope?
The hard drive is now being shipped to a more well known company, Drive Savers - [url]and I'm guessing that this is the last hope, because the more the drive gets tampered with, the more chance of permanent data loss.
So yeah.. I was just wondering what you think? If the file system is so severely damaged, do you think it STILL can be recovered?
I have 100+ sites on this hard drive, and one site in particular that meant the world to me.
My host sent the drive to Gillware first, but they failed saying that the file system was so severely damaged that they could not recover anything.
Then shortly after, my host sent it to DriveSavers, a very well-known company, but they also FAILED.
I'm extremely depressed because of this. Please don't post if you're going to say "make sure you do backups next time" because I've heard it 504329504395 times now, and while I do realize my mistake, saying that does NOT help me.
I am willing to spend ALOT to get my sites back. I still have hope. Are there any other companies out there BETTER than DriveSavers? Assuming that you'd still have hope even after two companies failed, where you would you go or what would you do?
who you have used in the past to recover damanged hard drives that have been dropped. I got a client that damanged his HD, and it needs to be sent out to someone who is reliable is not gonna cheat and steal the data.
if someone have for mistake cancelled a cpanel account and in the same dir was the backup file of this account, should be possible to recovery at least the backup file from the deleted files? Or the entire dir cancelled?
to recover a back-up from my server which i deleted yesterday. is there any linux utility/script or whatever which can restore data?
I'm running centos 4.3 64-bit SMP
Harddisks: 6 X 18.2 GB U160 scsi disks, 15k rpm 2 disks in raid 1, on channel 0 to the raid controller (OS and software) 4 disks in raid 5, on channel 1 to the raid controller (web files, php, html, images etc. and all databases. )
Volumegroup 1 logical volume 1 = 14 GB for the OS Logical volume 2 = 4 GB for the swap file
Volume group 2 Logical volume 1 = 20 GB, mounted to /var for the databases and other var stuff Logical volume 2 = 30 GB, mounted to /home for all webfiles etc.
The backup was located on VG2, LV2 = /home , and i removed it by using the rm -rf command.
My server (Fedora Core V and Plesk 8) hard disk broke 2 days ago and my bakckup tar.gz is too old.
Datacenter (fdcservers.net) tried to put old harddisk as slave but server is not recognising the old drive. Datacenter say that can not do anything more.
My question:
Is there any software or company that can recovery my harddisk data?
I heard from some technicians that SAS disk recovery is going to be much more difficult than the current generation of hard disk. Is it true? Anyone tried recovering from a spoilt SAS hard disk before?
I am not familiar with quick backup methods, but let me give you an example which might help you provide me with the best possible information.
1. I currently run a hosting business.
2. cPanel accounts are backedup nightly.
Question: I am worried something may happen to the server (DoS Attack) or just an internal error - what would be the quickest way to have your entire webserver back online?
I was thinking another HD with the same installation/configuration.
What procedures have other hosting organizations taken to prevent there web server from loosing downtime.
I am trying to recover some backups on the server by rsync the home dir from BQbackup to my server. I deleted 1 file to see whether it actually works. I executing this command on the server:
I saw that it downloaded the file I deleted, however after checking on FTP if the file was recovered it actually wasn't. Is there something wrong in the command I used as it seems that it is not recovering any files.
I'm putting together a disaster recovery plan and I'm trying to come up with a quick way to get new machines in place in case of catastrophic hardware failure, e.g. two servers go down at the same time (this is an HA setup and must always remain fault tolerant). At this point I'm trying to find someone who would rent a server to me, allowing me to take physical possession of it.
Why do I need physical possession of it? The problem is that I use IP-based storage on a private network and therefore can't rely on a rented server in another cabinet, even across the aisle in the same datacenter, without adding significant complexity to my setup.
So my question, in summary, is this: What would be the fastest, cheapest and simplest way to get a new server in my cabinet in a few short hours?
My servers are going to be in Colo4Dallas, so if there's a provider there who specializes in this or has made an arrangement with you or someone you know in the past, please let me know about them. If you can think of a better way to do things (the obvious solution of investing in more servers excluded),
I'm used to operating dedicated servers. This year I want to venture into getting a reseller account and / or media temple account.
With my dedicated servers, I do automated mysql dumps and I do nightly rsyncs of all my /home /etc and other important data so disaster recovery is possible.
My question is, how do you do the same thing? Sleep well at night? with these regular web hosting accounts?
I see most newbie people who pay for web hosting do not bother to backup their data. Ignorance is bliss until disaster strikes.
How do you automatically backup your data (mysql and directories) in your multiple web hosting accounts like reseller or grid service media temple?
I have my backup disks here because my server got hacked and we didn't like how liquidweb made the things. So we ask them to ship us the disk. They ran photorec and they got lots of .gz files from it. All accounts I would say. But 50% of them the .tar.gz files came corrupt. And is lefting all the big accounts and until now I haven't seen any corrupted file that came with MySQL. And I think MySQL is most important to all clients.
one of the worst things (in hosting) has happened. I received a notice this morning from lfd (configserver) that someone had logged into my server as root and it wasn’t me.
Unfortunately I didn’t notice it until eight hours later so I have no idea (yet) what happened during that period. Thankfully I don’t have any really critical data on the system that could have been stolen.
I’m in the process of restoring from a full system backup right now. After that’s done I’m going to look to see what the differences are between the files from the backup and that on the comprised drive. I’m not sure if I’ll get anything useful from the diff but hopefully I’ll find a clue as to how they got root access.
Then of course I need to get my server back up. However, I don’t want to do this until I’ve taken some steps to identify how the individual got in and take some additional preventative steps.
Here’s what I am planning on doing:
1) Check to make sure all exposed services are patched and look at some security sites to see if there are any known vulnerabilities for these services. Anyone know which sites are good to look at?
2) Change firewall to only allow ssh access from a couple specific IP addresses.
3) Disable root ssh access so I have to login via a different account and perform sudos, etc.
4)?
I’ll also look for a good server-hardening guide to see if there are some obvious things I forgot to secure.
Do any of you find folks have any other suggestions or resources that I should check out?
I'm trying to find a good hosting provider to host our company's website as our fallback option in case of disaster. One or two dedicated servers should do it, but it'll need the space/bandwidth to host a database of around 60-80 gigs, with the ability to rsync newer copies of the database on a regular basis. We also need to store a Tomcat website, which will take up much less space, but also need to be rsynced to be kept up to date on a regular basis, though less often than
Also, we probably need Red Hat Linux specifically, as opposed to other flavors of Linux.
Of course we need root access to install the other apps we'll need. My paramount concern is the security of our companies data, much of which not only has to be protected for our companies sake, but also for laws such as HIPAA, etc. Cost is a consideration, but security, dependability, and flexibility (root access to our machine, ability to rsync between sites) is more important.
I was wondering if anyone's got suggestions for me, hosting providers they've liked for these purposes? I'm looking at Media Temple's dpv Nitro option right now ...
There is so much information on disaster recovery and backing up one's server, that I'm getting glassy-eyed trying to take it in. Maybe if I became an actual case study, and get some "group think" help, this thread could benefit many others in a similar situation.
Current Situation:
1. I'm a small hosting company, 5 years in existence, with about 350 clients. www.mlhi.net
2. Dedicated Linux server, PLESK CP w/unlimited domains license, fully managed at HostNexus (great guys). It does not have a RAID array (used to have that at Rackspace) but it does have a backup drive that everything is backed up to with a cron job every night.
3) In addition I have a Linux Sys Admin on retainer, www.linuxbox.co.uk (he is better than excellent). Two years of excellent server maintenance and security on top of the managed service I get at HostNexus.
4) I just bought a VPS plan at JauguarPC.com after much research (a lot of it here at WHT) and as they say "so far so good" with the ease of dealing with them. I have not setup anything there yet- just got the VPS provisioned a few days ago.
Fears and Concerns:
1. Data center destroyed/ my server burns up (including backup drive) etc etc.
2. DDOS attack (which did hit this data center a few months ago and I was down for hours)
3. If I had to FTP everything back to another server from my local, at 18 GB, it's not too cool.
Want to do this:
1. I want my Sys Admin to run a backup copy (and incrementals every night) to an identically configured VPS server at JaguarPC. Both servers are now running identical PLESK 8.4.
2. I want the fastest recovery possible without spending a ton of money. I know this means I don't get an "instant" recovery, but recovery within 24 hours is more than OK. None of my customers are ecommerce... just brochureware sites.
My "I'm not an expert" plan:
1. If primary server goes bye-bye forever, I can login to my BulkRegister/Enom account and change the child nameserver IPs to the IP's of the VPS. In 24 hours or less, every request for the nameservers would then be routed to the new server.
2. I can create an A record on every domain like www2.johndoeinsurance.com that would point to the IP at the VPS, so I can ease my mind anytime I want to make sure everything is safe and sound on the second server, and ready to go in an emergency.
How do I configure the DNS?
I control dns at Enom for about two-thirds of my customers. I have ALL domains pointed to ns.mlhi.net and ns2.mlhi.net. Here are my options??
1. I create two more child nameservers... ns3 and ns4 and have then pointed to the IPs at the new server, then update all the domains I control. The rest of the customers I can email and ask them to add the additional nameservers. I know... good luck on them doing it.
2. I change the ns2 IP to go to the new server. And I make sure when I make edits on a website during the day that I FTP to both servers.
3. I don't have any nameservers assigned to the new server. I just change the IP on the existing nameservers in the event of an emergency.
At times as I'm developing, due to some coding error in PHP on my part, particularly calling a COM object, the apache server crashes. I'm delighted that it recovers, but in so doing it always tries to rerun the query that crashed it, which just causes another crash, and so on. Is there some way of getting round this, so that it recovers but the problematic code is not rerun?
XP SP3 (still!) Apache/2.4.3 (Win32) mod_fcgid/2.3.7 PHP/5.4.9 Firefox (Aurora)
How can a customer (or admin, for that matter) reset or recover a lost password to the control panel? We don't see an option for this in the current version of PPA.
I'm working on a plan for restoring my whole Plesk server fast in a worst case scenario. Which will never happen hopefully.
The backup is a full backup done by the Backup Manager in Plesk. It lies on a remote FTP server.
Right now I'm fetching the whole backup directory with wget while in the background the Plesk Installation is running. These actions take about 1h to complete.
Afterwards I would restore with /usr/local/psa/bin/pleskrestore.
Is there a better way? For example installing Plesk directly out of a full backup?
We just upgraded our server with 8 brand new seagate cheetah 15k.5's, a battery backup unit, and a 256mb dimm for the raid controller. In the boot process, i noticed an error about caching or something.
After analyzing the dmesg log, i found the error: sda: asking for cache data failed sda: assuming drive cache: write through
It seems like the kernel can't get to the raid controllers cache, so it switches to the write through setting.
I've benchmarked the harddisks with the write through, and write back setting. The odd thing is that both settings deliver the same performance.
Normally, write back increases the performance with like 100%... That's why we bought the battery backup unit.
So something is going wrong, but where lays the problem?
Server:
Quote:
8 X seagate cheetah 15k.5, U320, 16mb cache, SCA, 73GB 1 X chenbro backplane, U320, SCA, 2 channels, 8 ports 1 X LSI megaraid 320-2x raid controller, U320, 2 channels, battery pack and 256 upgraded dimm 6 GB DDR PC3200, ECC, CL3 2 X AMD opteron dual cores (4 X 2.0 ghz)
when am sending emails its cannot be delevired .. and its show me this error
"There was an error sending your message: Failed to send data [SMTP: Invalid response code received from server (code: 451, response: Temporary local problem - please try later)]"
i think its from the CFS i installed it
when i go to Cpanel my site the email " manager / creat " there is a red line content
Fatal! Write Failure: /etc/valiases/box.site.com . Ignore any messages of success this can only result in failure!
I am putting this thread to take other people advise and to advise them about my bad experience with rsync. Lucky, I was able to get my data back through the old drive
Three times a day, I take mysqldump and then rsync that mysql dump to a drive located in a different state.
Everything was working fine..The rsync was transferring data daily and updating the backup on other server. Few days ago, there was a hard drive failure on my server and then i checked in my backup drive for mysql dump...It was 764 bytes instead of 5 Gb...
Then i went to my other server where I rsync, to my surprise that was also 764 bytes from 5 Gb as it synced the both database..
My backup strategy failed and would be in tears if I couldn't grap data from failed drive
I would like to hear everyone views on this and learn from it
