Law firms are digitising ever-increasing quantities of information and documents, but their disaster recovery abilities are still a low priority. Rupert White spells out what can go wrong as a result


Back in February, the Gazette covered how, according to research done for the Software Solutions Guide 2007, more than a quarter of firms are looking to adopt digital scanning of inbound documents. Just over one-fifth are looking into digital dictation. This showed how firms are waking up to 21st century technologies.



Another point raised is that since the 2006 edition of the guide, many more firms say they have a business continuity plan in place. But according to the research, 27% of firms do not have a business continuity plan, and a further 37% only have a 'basic' plan.



This means law firms are about to start digitising vast amounts of information, way beyond the large amount they already generate and store through e-mails and word processing. But they are under-prepared for the consequences when this information becomes catastrophically unavailable.



So the Gazette travelled to Ontrack Data Recovery in Epsom, Surrey to see some experts in recovering damaged IT systems, hoping to relay a lesson in why disaster recovery planning as part of business continuity is so important.



The damage done



All hard drives eventually fail. This is the stark reality that IT managers and home PC users must face. According to Samsung, 30% of failures are 'shock induced'. In the modern world, this generally means that laptops are dropped, probably while they are still running. Though sophisticated new techniques inside the machines can try to 'park' hard drives while they fall, this will not always stop damage occurring.



Robert Winter, recovery engineering manager at Ontrack, said one of the most common problems they have to deal with is damaged disks and dropped laptops.



Damage comes in many forms, but a common one is when the magnetic heads used to read and write data to the disks inside the hard drive smack against the disk itself, called a head-slap. Normally, the heads ride on a cushion of air only nanometres thick above the surface of the disks or platters. They are never supposed to touch the platters, so when they do, only bad things can happen.



'After a head-slap, a small amount of debris flies off and is left inside the chamber,' Mr Winter explained. 'That material itself causes more damage and if it continues, the actual surface of the disk will be scoured off. That is what we call a crash, and eventually the drive will fail.'



So, someone drops their laptop while it is working, but when they restart it everything seems fine. Of course they do not tell IT or anyone else because everything seems fine. Meanwhile, inside their laptop, the hard drive is slowly destroying itself.



Another problem that occurs when a laptop is dropped is that the bearings inside the hard drive develop a flat spot, which is similar to what happens to a tyre during over-braking. When this happens, a future bearing failure is nigh-on inevitable, making recovery difficult.



But this is not the only way business information can be lost through a catastrophe. Though it might be true that anti-virus companies benefit from the regular virus scare stories, the power that a malicious virus has is undoubted. When the 'I Love You' virus was released in 2000 the results for many users were dire. 'I Love You', said Mr Winter, was the most severe virus he had seen, deleting all the contents of Microsoft Office documents. 'Even we couldn't recover the worst damaged,' he said.



Road to recovery



Ontrack generally recovers data that is lost to accidents. The advice for any company if it wants to stave off these horrors is to back-up properly. But that word 'properly' is the key.



'If a company has proper processes - does test restores, replaces media when recommended, stores

it in the correct environment and makes sure their tape drive is serviced correctly - they won't encounter any problems,' Mr Winter said.



'But people don't replace their media or store it in the correct environment. They put it in a dusty office and don't do test restores. Even when you have a person who religiously does their back-ups every day, you ask them: "Have you ever tested whether you can restore the data that you require?" And the answer is "No".'



Verifying back-ups has another vital role to play: it is a diagnostic tool, helping users to understand what they might be doing wrong.



So how does a law firm stay out of Ontrack's kindly clutches? The only answer, according to Mr Winter, is to have a plan and stick to it rigidly.



'You've got to go through this boring exercise called a disaster recovery plan,' he said. 'Everyone gets together and you decide what you need to continue operating your business in the event of various scenarios. Then you go through each scenario and identify what is the critical data that may be lost. You make sure you have a back-up or that you're not putting the information in that vulnerable situation.



'Once you've done that, you follow it religiously and don't allow people to get sloppy. I'd like to think that most companies, if they've done this and they get into one of these [disaster] situations, have got a second copy and can access the data,' he said.

Can your law firm say that?



LINK: www.ontrack.co.uk