By manufacturer
Dell PowerEdge HPE ProLiant Lenovo ThinkSystem Fujitsu Primergy Supermicro IBM System x / Power Acer AltosArchive rebuilding: metadata before files. Without permissions, the archive doesn't work.
After a storage failure the raw data is recoverable, but the structure has to be rebuilt: ACLs, extended attributes, links, directory layout, ownership. A document archive without correct metadata isn't a working archive — it's a set of files. We work on the part of recovery that usually gets overlooked.
Getting the files back isn't enough.
On file servers, document archives and document management systems, the structure around the files is as critical as the files themselves:
- Windows NTFS ACLs or Linux POSIX ACLs: who can read and write what.
- Extended attributes: classification, tags, application-specific metadata.
- Ownership: the binding between a file and a system user or group.
- Timestamps: created, modified, accessed — often relied on by internal audits.
- Symbolic links and hard links: relationships between files, essential to many applications.
- Directory structure: a hierarchy that mirrors business processes.
A "quick" recovery that saves the bytes but loses this metadata leaves an archive that stays unusable until the work is redone by hand.
Typical scenarios.
- Post-RAID recovery: rebuilding metadata once the byte-level data recovery is done.
- File server migration between systems: faithful preservation of ACLs, ownership and timestamps.
- Recovered filesystem corruption: restoring the filesystem logic, not just the individual files.
- DMS integration (document management): aligning filesystem metadata with application metadata.
This is not "indexing" or data entry.
To be clear about scope: we don't do manual document data entry, we don't run OCR on scans, and we don't build application taxonomies. Our scope is the filesystem and infrastructure layer: the structure the operating system uses to organise and protect files. Application-level reconstruction calls for a dedicated DMS/ECM partner.
The questions we get most often.
Is metadata always recovered along with the files?
When the recovery is done properly at filesystem level, yes — that's our standard. When the recovery is done in "carve" mode (pulling files out of the raw material without rebuilding the structure, typical in catastrophic scenarios), the metadata has to be rebuilt in a second pass. It can often be reconstructed from partial backups, application logs and related sources.
Can very complex Windows NTFS ACLs be recovered?
Yes, provided the filesystem is recoverable at logical level. The NTFS ACL structure (DACL, SACL, owner, SID) is preserved. If the Active Directory domain changed between the failure and the recovery (decommissioned users, altered SID history), the old SIDs may need to be mapped onto the new ones — something we handle with purpose-built scripts.
Do you also work on Synology/QNAP NAS?
Yes. Synology (Btrfs/ext4) and QNAP (Btrfs/ZFS/ext4) NAS units have their own ACL and permission models and their own administration tools. We work at native filesystem level, preserving the original ACLs and sharing schemes.