An electrical fire in the office building where the law firm of Marshall, Dennehey, Warner, Coleman & Goggin is located kept employees out for two weeks. But thanks to disaster recovery tools and disk-to-disk backup, they were able to work more or less without interruption, reports Ann Bednarz at NetworkWorld.

Because of the fire, which was caused by the building's primary electrical feeds, nobody from the law firm was allowed to enter the building to pick up the servers holding databases and documents. The IT infrastructure lost power and there were no data links. Fortunately, the firm had replaced its tape-based back-up system with a disk-to-disk system at its 19 offices, and it took only about three hours to get the data restored, said John Brooks, the firm's network services manager.

"We restored a SQL database and the file repository," Brooks said. "After our programmers created a custom application, the data was accessible to people in the office."

With the disk-to-disk system, changes to files and databases are backed up each night on remote servers, and the encrypted changes are transferred to a main vault at the firm's headquarters in Philadelphia. The aggregate data is also sent to a site in the suburbs for additional peace of mind.

With the tape-based back-up system that was previously in place, data restoration may not have been as smooth, Brooks said. "We had local office personnel changing tapes on a daily basis, and it was easy to miss a backup," he said, adding that it was possible for tapes to be lost when being moved to the headquarters from other sites.

For more:
- see Ann Bednarz's post at NetworkWorld

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