LIMS Imperatives - Data Backup and Recovery

This post is just to let you know about a short article on data recovery for your laboratory data. (Hopefully this is a service that you will never need!)

I personally know of a few absolute horror stories that happened to real testing labs with real data. They thought that they were doing real backups, only to find out that they were in real trouble later on.

Horror Stories - Full System Backups

One lab, in Florida, religiously did their backups every night, the way that they should have been doing. However, they never thought to test out any of the backups. Three years later they found out that the backups were not completing during the night, because an error message would pop up on the server at 2:00 AM when no one was around to notice it. Whoops!

Happily, someone finally figured this out, before a serious situation had developed. In that case they would have been dead in the water and would not have been able to recover. They would have gone under, out of business for ever.

Horror Stories - Database Backups In other cases, lab personnel who do their IT internally, as opposed to hiring third party IT professionals (this is true of most smaller labs) may do all of their backups the traditional way, by backing up the entire file system (image) which would seem to make sense most of the time. However, with and RDBMS like SQL Server it's not that simple. You really need to back up the data via a SQL Backup plan while SQL Server it is running. This is because the data files (2 per database) are all exclusively locked by SQL Server and cannot be 'copied' or 'backed up' by a normal windows type backup. Read here for best practices in setting up the best SQL backup plan strategy for your organization.

What You Can Do When All Else Fails

If that awful day comes when your computer drive fails and the data seems to be unrecoverable what can you do? What should you DO and more importantly what should you NOT do?

• NEVER put the drive in the freezer! 
• NEVER attempt to open it unless you have it sitting in a legitimate 'clean room' tank for repairing hard drives.

What should you do? There is still a glimmer of hope, but only if you work with a professional hard drive restoration outfit like Data Medics. The article can be viewed here.

In addition, if you happen to find yourself in a situation where you may need to have data recovered from a hard drive, first decide if you really need data recovery or not.