How is Microsoft recovering all the user data without having a backup to turn to? Inside sources tell Daniel Eran Dilger that Sun (the storage vendor) and Oracle (makers of the database software) have sent in their best people to attempt to stitch the database back together. Why is it taking so long?

“The first thing to do is wheel in a big pile of new disk space, and copy the individual disks so there is a raw backup. This is like making a copy of a jigsaw puzzle one piece at a time. Then they would assemble the puzzle using the copied pieces, in case any pieces need to be re-made from the original.

“This is very hard, requires detailed inside knowledge of how SAN addresses and volume manager layouts fit together with Oracle tables. Finally, they need to start up the database on top of the assembled puzzle, and Oracle will do its own clean up to get into a consistent state.

“The next thing you do is a fresh backup (several days), before you allow any users access to it. So it’s not surprising that this would take over a week, even after it was possible to say that the data is recoverable.”

I’m assuming that Microsoft considers the data “recovered” if they’re letting users access it. But we’re hearing reports of people missing contacts, some phone numbers for individual contacts, and other weird behavior including not even being able to download their info from the Desktop Interface. How is the data recovery working out for you guys?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 5:43 pm and is filed under Danger, Microsoft, Sidekick Disaster of 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.