A new customer contacted us with an urgent situation. Just before Easter their server had completely crashed and their server backup was 5 days old (so no emails, database changes, etc) and was not mounting for recovery. As opposed to going onsite (as we knew there was no chance of an onsite repair) we had the server couriered to our office to begin initial diagnostics and recovery tasks.
On receipt of the server we noticed quite a number of main board components burnt out. Repairs to the board were not attempted to due to large amount of damage and corrosion on the board plus a replacement board was going to be 4 weeks away and cost over $1,000 – not an acceptable option. Added to this, their RAID data array also had errors and would not mount on our usual tools with the backup facing the same issues.
We managed through a number of techniques to get their RAID array mounting, and despite many errors a 99% recovery rate of their data. As opposed to quoting on a whole new server, we met with the customer to discuss their actual needs and requirements. After this we arranged to setup their emails on Office 365 platform (hosted Exchange), and supply a NAS for their main file storage with offsite replication backup.
Within 4 days not only did we have their data recovered, but also had them on a new platform that delivered better features than they had previously and a much better disaster management plan.