How Shaw Air Force Base recovered flight data

When it looked like Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina had lost 45GB of pilot training and housing data last year in a data-storage crash, it was a heart-stopping moment for the IT staff.

"It had the training records," says Dean Johnson, network administrator in the 20th Civil Engineer Squadron at Shaw Air Force Base, home to the country's largest combat F-16 fighter plane group and headquarters of the Ninth Air Force and U.S. Forces Central. If the records couldn't be retrieved intact, there was the likelihood that almost 500 hours of training would have to be repeated.

The data had been stored in a 7-year-old Adaptec system with 12 drives, and the controller started having a problem one day. "One day when it went down, it wouldn't come up," Johnson says. "We called Adaptec and we determined the controller had failed."

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When it looked like Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina had lost 45GB of pilot training and housing data last year in a data-storage crash, it was a heart-stopping moment for the IT staff.

"It had the training records," says Dean Johnson, network administrator in the 20th Civil Engineer Squadron at Shaw Air Force Base, home to the country's largest combat F-16 fighter plane group and headquarters of the Ninth Air Force and U.S. Forces Central. If the records couldn't be retrieved intact, there was the likelihood that almost 500 hours of training would have to be repeated.

The data had been stored in a 7-year-old Adaptec system with 12 drives, and the controller started having a problem one day. "One day when it went down, it wouldn't come up," Johnson says. "We called Adaptec and we determined the controller had failed."

Worse, it was discovered that somehow the Veritas back-up system had been disconnected, "probably human error," Johnson says. "Now I had no way to retrieve the data."

At that point, Johnson turned to a firm specializing in data retrieval, Novato, Calif.-based DriveSavers, which was under contract with the Air Force. DriveSavers specializes in recovering data from drives in sticky situations, and you typically send your problem to them.

"I shipped off the 12 drives involved to California," Johnson says. "They had to re-create the array and they figured out what drive went where and how to see what was on the drives."

Within a week, Shaw Air Force base got its i45 gig of training and housing data back intact, Johnson says, recounting the relief he felt when the Air Force data, nearly lost in action, came in for a smooth landing after all.

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