We have an older Pioneer DVD JukeBox that stores over 200 DVD’s. This device was installed over 5 years ago and all of the folks involved in the installation have left our group. It was fairly dormant for the first 2 or 3 years however about 2 years ago we started using it as an archive repository. We use Point Software to virtually bind a number of DVD’s together which then appear as a Share for folks and applications to use.
Over the last 6 months we have had a number of hardware related issues with the Jukebox. Internal switches would fail causing problems, shares would fail to mount and most recently two DVD drives had to be replaced. With this most recent failure we also realized that the bad DVD drive, damaged one of the DVD’s in the share. There were 40 DVD’s in the share and it would not mount because one of the DVD’s was damaged. You could actually see the damage on one side of the DVD so we pulled the damaged DVD and worked through remounting the share with only 39 DVD’s.
We tried to read the damaged DVD on multiple DVD readers however we could not read the DVD. We realized that we did not have a backup copy of the DVD, breaking Kevin’s Rule Number 1 for all System Administrators, Backups are a Requirement. After further investigating, the original thought was that we backed up the data before archiving, so we would not need to backup or copy the archived data on the DVD server. However, with data spread across 40 drives, it was hard to determine which data was missing and a further complication was the fact that most of the data was from 2003 and we had selective backups from 2003 that probably would not work.
We were in trouble and Directors and VP’s were looking for answers. I Goggled "Data Recovery" and identified thousands of companies that claimed they could restore your data. I called 4 different vendors and chose one close to work. I had a pay a premium to escalate our recovery however the vendor turned the restoration around in 2 days and recovered all of the data on the DVD. This allowed us to move the data back to the archive share however stressed the need for a backup or copy of our Archived DVD data.
Once the crisis died down, my team investigated how to copy a DVD within the Jukebox, and has started the process to make a duplicate DVD copy for all Archived DVD’s in the Jukebox.
Though-out this process, all I could think about was RULE Number 1:
Backups are a Requirement and are Crucial to your success
