Data recovery is the process of retrieving digital data from a secondary storage location when it has been lost, damaged, or corrupted and is no longer accessible as usual because of system failure, or a failed or compromised hardware system. Data recovery is needed in a number of situations, such as when a computer has an operating system failure, hard disk failure, or a storage device malfunctions. Sometimes users accidentally delete files which they need to recover. In the context of forensics or espionage, data recovery may be needed to retrieve encrypted or hidden files, and virus attacks can also encrypt or hide files that may need to be recovered. On an enterprise scale, data recovery is needed when a business is affected by fires, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other disruptive disasters that may affect their data centers.
In the enterprise setting, the IT department is responsible for restoring a copy of the lost data to desktops, laptops, servers or external storage from a backup. The organization decides which of their data is essential to stay operational and designs a data replication strategy that will enable it to quickly restore core applications and data when needed. Most data recovery plans involve a combination of technologies and tools and will rely on the organization’s overarching disaster recovery plan to prioritize the data recovery efforts and set recovery points and recovery time objectives.
Tools like Geo Clustering for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension can minimize the impact of regional disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes by automatically transferring mission-critical workloads away from the affected area so they can continue to run. And SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension enables a quick return to full operational status after a node failure, and provides continuous, real time replication of data.