Ontrack® Remote Data Recovery™

Our Ontrack® Remote Data Recovery™ (RDR™) solution is a proprietary remote service that offers the fastest, most convenient, and most cost-effective solution for data recovery situations where the hardware is still functioning properly.

RDR is therefore only suitable for non-physical problems such as:

• Inaccessible partition
• Formatted drive
• Deleted files
• Deleted array
• RAID configuration lost
• File corruption (Microsoft® Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, etc)

However, if your media is physically damaged, we can still help you recover your data using our in-lab data recovery services.

The Remote Data Recovery process

Step 1: Customer hardware setup & client install

Step 2: Connection process & security issues

Step 3: Capabilities

Step 4: Advantages

Step 1: Setting up your hardware and installing RDR client

• Set up secondary drive. This safeguards against the possibility of overwritting data on the drive we are recovering.
• Download and install our client software onto the secondary drive.

Step 2: The connection process and security issues

Once installed, you will see four options to choose from: native Windows, boot disk, native Netware, or native Solaris.

The standard connection is native windows.

The connection process:

• RDR software connects as an outgoing TCP/IP connection on port 80 (the WWW port), from your location to our servers, creating a tunnel/ point-to-point connection.
• You can also connect via a proxy server or encapsulate the encrypted RDR packets inside HTTP packets (offers access through packet filtering enabled firewalls).

Security issues:

The RDR connection is only used by our engineers to remotely control the utilities installed on your secondary drive which repair those file system structures (partition tables, FAT, Master File Tables, etc) that allow you to access your data.

Screen updates and keyboard packets are sent across the connection, but actual customer data files are not.

• RDR does not use a third-party hosting product. The client software allows for a direct TCP/IP connection to the RDR server.
• The communication link in our standard native Windows client uses the Microsoft Crypto API/ RSA encryption (128 bit) provided with Internet Explorer.
• The communication link in the boot disk, Netware native, or Solaris native client uses an encryption algorithm created by our R&D team.
• The RDR communication uses a proprietary protocol, not HTTP or publicly understood protocol.

Step 3: RDR capabilities

RDR can recover from:

• All Microsoft® Windows® versions with any file system.
• Novell® NetWare® 3 and above. Traditional Novell NetWare file system and NSS.
• Linux with file systems EXT2, EXT3, and ReiserFS (hard drive must be slaved to a Microsoft Windows machine for recovery).
• Most other Unix flavours 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). Please note, there are some limitations to remote Apple 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 Exchange Server internally corrupted or deleted files (Priv.EDB, Pub.EDB).
• Microsoft SQL Server 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.
• Internally 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. If you are sure then please contact the Kroll Ontrack team: +44 (0) 13 7273 6640  

Step 4: Advantages of RDR

• Our Remote Data Recovery service is the fastest way to recover your data as there is no need to ship your media. This saves an average of two days in transit time.
• We can start working live on our drive as soon as the connection is made meaning that we do not have to image your drive saving time in-lab.
• Our recoveries are non-destructive, we do not write to the recovered drive(s).
• 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.