Ontrack Data Recovery

Data Recovery Services > Ontrack Data Recovery Remote Services

Ontrack Data Recovery Remote Services

 
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The Ontrack® Data Recovery Remote Service is the fastest, most convenient and most cost effective solution for situations where hardware is functioning properly. If your media is physically damaged, please check our in-lab data recovery services
Kroll Ontrack® is the ONLY provider of this technically advanced, proprietary remote service and it can be provided to every city and country in the world, without the need to ship equipment anywhere.

  1. How it works - Customer Hardware setup & ODRRS Client install
  2. Connection process & security issues
  3. ODRRS capabilities
  4. Advantages of ODRRS

1. How it Works – Customer Hardware Setup & ODRRS Client Install

When?

We can recover data remotely as long as we are dealing with a non-physical problem, i.e.:

  • Inaccessible partition
  • Formatted drive
  • Deleted files
  • Deleted array
  • RAID configuration lost
  • File corruption [Exchange, SQL, Sharepoint, etc.]

If you are unsure whether it is a physical or logical problem, we can perform a quick physical check on your system through our remote client software.

How?

We will work remotely on drives that are connected as secondary. The reason is that Operating Systems constantly write to drives and we want the drive we are recovering to stay the same during our recovery.
For a single drive system, you just need to slave the drive [for laptop drives, they will need an adaptor laptop to IDE or a USB caddy]
For a multiple drive system, there are 2 possibilities:

  • You will need to show us the array, but the partition or logical drive that has the data you are after needs to be secondary.
  • If the RAID configuration was lost or there is a chance there is RAID damage, we need to see the drives as separate units and you will need to break the RAID.

Your controller might support the JBOD [Just a Bunch Of Drives] mode and you can use that to present the drives separately.

You can also get a Promise card for IDE or SATA or a SCSI card, which will not act as a controller.

Note: we do not need the Operating System to assign a letter to the drive or understand what is on the drive. We just need the drive to be seen in the BIOS. For that reason, we can recover any file system connected to a Windows machine.

Then we ask you to download and install our client software [ODRRS.exe] from www.ontrack.com/connect.

2. Connection Process and Security Issues

The connection process:

Remote data recovery services

First, you will need to download the client software and install it on the server, desktop or laptop connected to the drive[s] needing recovery. ODRRS has four client options – native Windows, boot disk, native Netware, or native Solaris. All four use the same type of connection.

For most recoveries, we will use the native Windows version of our client.

Next the Ontrack client software connects as an outgoing TCP/IP connection on port 80 (the WWW port) from your location to the Kroll Ontrack server, basically creating a tunnel or point to point connection through the internet. Since the connection is outgoing on port 80, it can get through most firewalls without any trouble.

The Ontrack client software uses a Kroll Ontrack proprietary protocol for communication, but also has the option of encapsulating the encrypted Ontrack packets inside HTTP packets to get through any firewall with packet filtering enabled. The client software also has support to connect through a proxy server.

ODRRS protects your data in four ways:

  • Direct connection to the ODRRS server . The client software allows for a direct TCP/IP connection to the ODRRS server. ODRRS does not use a 3 rd party hosting product.
  • Encryption

The communication link in our Windows client (used on most recoveries) uses the Microsoft Crypto API provided with Internet Explorer which uses RSA encryption. We currently use 128 bit encryption.

The communication link in the boot disk, Netware native, or Solaris native client uses an Ontrack created encryption algorithm.

  • Proprietary protocol

The ODRRS communication uses a proprietary protocol, not HTTP or any public protocol that others would understand.

  • No customer data is transferred over the connection

The ODRRS connection is only used by the Kroll Ontrack engineer to remote control the Kroll Ontrack utilities directly on your machine. Screen updates and keyboard packets are sent across the connection, but actual customer data files are not. Instead the Kroll Ontrack engineer is controlling tools to repair file system structures (Partition tables, FAT, Master File Tables, etc) which will make the data accessible to you.

3. ODRRS capabilities

ODRRS can recover from:

  • All Windows versions with any file system
  • Novell NetWare 3 and above. Traditional NetWare file system and NSS.
  • Linux with file systems EXT2, EXT3, and ReiserFS– hard drive must be slaved to a Windows machine for recovery
  • Most other Unix flavors such as AIX, SCO, SGI, SUN, VXFS – hard drive must be slaved to a Windows machine for recovery
  • Apple, Mac – hard drive must be slaved to a Windows machine for recovery. There are limitations to remote MAC recoveries during copy out, as we might lose resource forks.

Special Cases

  • Windows or NetWare software RAIDs, mirrors, spans, volume sets, etc, including Dynamic Disk
  • Most hardware RAID problems, even if one drive is bad in RAID 5! (Requires some time for customer to reconfigure the hardware)
  • Snap Servers or any other NAS can be copied out as long as drives can be moved to a Windows machine.
  • External hard drives, Memory cards, Sandisks, pen drives, or just about any type of storage device that Windows supports.
  • Any type of compression except for FAT
  • NTFS Encryption
  • SAN servers

Special file recovery capabilities for internally corrupt files

  • Microsoft ExchangeServer internally corrupted or deleted files. (Priv.EDB, Pub.EDB)
  • Microsoft SQLServer internally corrupted or deleted files. (.DAT or .MDF)
  • QuickBooks internally corrupted files
  • Microsoft Outlook .PST file recoveries, even if file is missing and cannot be un-deleted.
  • I nternally corrupted Windows Backup files

Send the drive[s] in to our Lab

  • Tapes of any kind
  • Hardware failures (Except one drive failure in RAID 5)
  • HPFS, VAX, VMS, System 36
  • Optical Disks, CD / DVD Recovery

There are always exceptions to these general rules. Please call us on 0800 243 996 if you are unsure.

4. Advantages of ODRRS

This is the fastest way to recover your data:

  • No need to send us your media, which means 2 days saved as an average receiving and sending your drive back! It can be done anywhere in the world!
  • We start work as soon as the connection is made and work live on your drive. We would need to image your drive if it were a Lab recovery and therefore save in imaging time.

Note: Our recoveries are non-destructive, we do not write to the recovered drive[s].

  • There is no data transfer and our connection is secure [Please see 3.]
  • No need to buy a backup drive, we can extract your data to the local drive, to an external drive or to a network location your provide us with.