One of the most frightening aspects of computer technology for any IT manager is the loss of data stored on mass storage devices (disk drives).

Loss of data can have disastrous effects on a business with financial and legal implications. Consider one company that had a sophisticated storage area network (SAN) with redundant sites hosting mirrored data. The problem was that a series of hardware failures and administrative mistakes made the data inaccessible on both sites, and it forced the IT department to restore a great amount of data from tape.

But what would have happened if the backup tapes failed in this instance? It happens all the time. Tape is not the most reliable medium there is, and this company could conceivably have been put out of business.

This article will review some options for recovering data including a cool way to recover data from a Windows disk using a Linux server.

You've lost data. Now what?

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