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My hosting provider has told me that the server harddisk that I am currently using is crashed and they failed to recover most of the data and they only managed to recover some files or folder from the crashed HDD (Less than 1%) by utilising the forensic recovery toolkit.

They claims that they have tried several methods such as ext3grep, linux rescue, fsck and multiple recovery tools but without success.

All my data in this 6 years is gone and they will just extend the hosting expired date to another 90 days.

Is there any other way to retrieve the data from the crashed harddisk?

I am a webdeveloper and have limited knowledge on the IT side. Basically I am using slax live CD to copy all the important files from the crash window to thumbdrive or another PC through network.

As I know mysql is storing under "/var/lib/mysql", if we manage to copy all the "table.frm" and paste in in another server, is this is going to work out?

Need your helps. Thank you.

regards, cw

cww
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    Can't help, but is this a dedicated server, over which you were supposed to backup? or a shared hosting provider, that your ISP should have been backing up for you? If so,and they have no backups, please let us know who it is so we can avoid using them - having no backups is inexcusable if they were supposed to be doing this for you. – EJB Mar 01 '12 at 14:15
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    I would be majorly, majorly pissed if I knew they were using just one disk (not in a mirror, or RAID, just stand-alone) to host my site. Backups are one thing but not looking after disk integrity is inexcuseable. All I can is *good luck*. – tombull89 Mar 01 '12 at 14:18
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    Well, why would you be pissed? The contract you sign for the server clearly states the conditions of how it will be provided. The Poster did not select that option - now he has to live with that decision. IT Decisions have consequences, this is why professionals do not take these decisions lightly. – TomTom Mar 01 '12 at 14:33
  • Are you paying your hosting company to manage the server for you (SLAs, Backup, etc), or are you expected to manage it yourself? If the answer is manage it yourself, then refer to @TomTom's answer, because you're at the mercy of the hard disk gods. – Bryan Mar 01 '12 at 14:43
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    If he pays for backups etc then yes, totally different story. But then this is not "I lost my disc" but "they betrayed me" and you better taket hem to court - they are liable. – TomTom Mar 01 '12 at 14:46
  • This is a shared hosting, my senior sign up for the hosting plan 6 years before and I just the company 3 years before, so I totally didn't aware of the hosting plan and packages. – cww Mar 01 '12 at 15:29
  • Just to make a comment, like everyone has stated, you always need a backup on your own. Never trust any sort of hard drive... this is the main reason why I keep all of my data on another hard drive on my computer, on an external hard drive, on an offsite service, and another server in another data center. If data is truly important to you, it needs to be taken care of. I sometimes even buy a dual-layered DVD and rip the files to the DVD and store it in a fire-proof safe. Most shared hosting companies don't have as redundant backups... sadly. Rsync is your friend. – Taylor Jasko Mar 01 '12 at 15:43
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    sheesh, how about somehow helps the guy rather than berating him for things that were obviously not his responsibility has a web developer. @cww, can you get the physical hard drive? Is the hosting company willing to provide it to you? – user606723 Mar 01 '12 at 15:47
  • Thank you @user606723, I don't think so, now still waiting for the hosting provider to replied for my query, they are out of working time by now. – cww Mar 01 '12 at 16:07

2 Answers2

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All my data in this 6 years is gone and they will just extend the hosting expired date to another 90 days

That is very generous of them. Seriously.

Is there any other way to retrieve the data from the crashed harddisk?

Get the disc, send it to a recovery lab. Cost is some US$ PER GIGABYTE OF DISC SIZE. Are you willing to pay that?

See:

All my data in this 6 years is gone

Yes, because you did not take a backup. I am sure your host specified in the contracts that they don't do backups like that.

I am a web developer and have limited knowledge on the IT side.

So why you run your own server? There are reasons people hire IT folk to run the servers.

Need your helps.

Get out of IT. The data is MOST likely toast. If it is not you will need to pay a lot to a recovery company. Such as:

http://www.datarecovery.eu/en/data-recovery-main-page.html

Use this as a learning experience, rebuild and - well - start using one of the myriad of backup services.

Chris S
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TomTom
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    Or perhaps the server company told him they were doing backups and didn't, I understand that he should have been doing his own backups but if you;re paying someone to do it then some people might not see it as neccesary. So while I agree with some of your points I think you were overly harsh and judgemental with a fair bit of it. – Joe Taylor Mar 01 '12 at 14:54
  • I agree, it is a bit overly harsh. That said you should *always* have your own backups, no exceptions, ever. You should have them locally, offsite, and multiple revisions. It's practically a licence to use a computer in this day and age. I can understand why tomtom is annoyed though. Its very frustrating when you see people lose data in such ways. – Sirex Mar 01 '12 at 15:00
  • In fact this system was developed by my senior 6 years ago and when they signed up with the hosting provider which I haven't join my current company. – cww Mar 01 '12 at 15:36
  • I just help to debug the system if there is any problems with the software. I do have backup of the source code but not database. I didn't run my own server so that's why we outsource to a hosting company. I have use several hosting company and all of them are providing backup services automatically with the plan. I do admit this is my mistake for not re-checking the terms and conditions when I renew for the hosting services. Thank you for your comments and yes I do learned a very expensive lesson. – cww Mar 01 '12 at 15:49
  • Your local backups would override any service agreements with any external company. that's partly why its so important. I realise it's after the fact, but there really is no good outcome in this situation otherwise. You're not the first, nor will be the last, but it's pretty painful for all involved seeing people lose data in ways like this that should really never happen. As a developer, i'm not blaming you, its just a sad day. – Sirex Mar 01 '12 at 15:51
  • As others have stated though, if you do have a case, take them to court. Else, i guess you just have to live and learn. – Sirex Mar 01 '12 at 15:54
  • If you only debug the system perhaps there are other people who work on the system who do have a backup. Maybe check around to see if anyone has taken one. – Joe Taylor Mar 01 '12 at 16:17
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    All senior has left after I join the company for 3 months. Most of them are trainee. No luck. I am consider the most senior in my department. lol. The pain is everything has to learned and do by myself. – cww Mar 01 '12 at 16:22
  • Ouch. Well, your boss then has reponsibility - sorry for the blame. ANyhow, tyour options are sadly extremely limited at that point. Yoru boss has to decide. There are options with good chances - the labs take the dic out of the drivei n a clean room, use al aser to read out the whole disc magnetic field then decode it. it may work or not (depends on physical damage - the head may have destory parts of the structure), but it will cost. So, itis a boss level decision. – TomTom Mar 01 '12 at 16:39
  • Thank you. btw, just want to check with you guys, I am not trying to blame the hosting provider or any 1, just an example, if let said we subscribe sharehosting **WITHOUT** the backup solutions, and suddenly their server crashed and we do not touch anything on their serverside, then they create another new server for us and pointing the nameserver to new IP, they are expecting customer who didn't subscribe their backup solutions to restore their own data back to the server. Questions is, is customer is the one responsible to restore data back everytime their server crash? – cww Mar 01 '12 at 17:08
  • Example, one day, you receive an email said "Hi, we have found that your database is corrupted, kindly restore it back.", then next week, you receive another email "Your email is missing due to server configurations error, kindly restore it back from your backup". Are we as customer going to do this job everytime? or it is the responsibility of services provider to restore back to the original state before the server crash? I am just trying to know more about my rights and my responsibility. Thank you. It is very hard for me to draw a line between this. – cww Mar 01 '12 at 17:16
  • Yes, you are giong to do it every time. This is what it entails. Eery tiem should be arare, though .- if the server dcorrupts all the time, you ahve a hardware problem. But yes, your back responsibility, better have a good plan. My databases are backed up every 10 minutes to a separate system. – TomTom Mar 01 '12 at 17:22
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I agree with the points made about backups, but if you had those you wouldn't be asking us about data recovery. An expensive lesson learned.

At this point your options may well be very limited. While it is possible for specialist recovery services to do good work at recovering data from broken hard disks, this very much depends on the fault; if its one that involves physical damage to the disk platters then spinning it up to run lots of lightweight 'data recovery' tools makes doing anything further with it a losing proposition.

Rob Moir
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