The power of Automated Alerting for hard drive recovery

ByDaniel Gottilla

The power of Automated Alerting for hard drive recovery

You are sitting in a cafe with your friends when suddenly your cell phone rings. When you look at the screen, you see the new messagereport. While reading it, you find out that there was a power shortage in your company building and that hard drive recovery of all of your computers was successful. Then you can sit back and enjoy the rest of the evening or run to the company’s office depending on the specific situation. You know everything, and you can react accordingly with no need of people screaming on the phone. In fact, there is no living person needed to do that. How can that be possible?

The answer is: automated alerting applications. There is an enormous amount of automated monitoring systems around us. Personal life alert devices, fire sensors they launch a signal that is automatically delivered to a proper service. It is because automated methods cost less and it is becoming very common. From hard drive recovery reporting to stock notifications automated alerting systems are used everywhere.

There are four main methods of sending an alert report. The first and the oldest one is using a dedicated, specially designed alarm line between the sensor and the proper alarm station. It usually triggers some kind of a sound alarm. Because in this method one sensor is dedicated to one indicator, the source of alert can be easily identified. This method, however, has many flaws first of all, it is extremely expensive. Another thing is that it only notifies you about an alarm being triggered there is no detailed data given (it is good for fire alarm, but it won’t tell you if hard drive recovery was successful or not).

Another form of an automated alerting system is a pager message. Unfortunately, it slowly becomes obsolete. Recently, the cost of pager services became too high, but this method made possible to provide as many details as was needed – even the number of files that were lost after hard drive recovery.

The method of sending an e-mail report is the third method. It is by far the cheapest and most detailed one. There is, however, one major flaw and the successful delivery depends on constant access to the computer. Sending a message about a hard drive recovery process or about a burglary attempt has some sense only when someone can receive it, thus making this method less effective.

That’s why the last method is near perfection. It incorporates all the best aspects of other methods, while lacking their flaws. The use of a short message system is currently the best way of sending alerts: very detailed, almost instantly delivered and economical. From the emergency service doctors to company owners; from fire fighters to hard drive recovery trained personnel they all have one thing in common the cell phone.