Without getting too much into it because there is another long thread about the issue that we had, the short version is that we had a catastrophic RAID 10 failure and had to send it off to DriveSavers in CA to reclaim the data.
First let me say that Drive Savers are phenomenal and should be used by everyone. I was sure, based on circumstances this would be a total loss of all the data we have ever had since going electronic. It took them a week, but they were able to get 85% of our files back - ~250,000 files. Only one problem - No Directory structure was able to be recovered. Now, I must point out that we paid them (a reduced rate bc they were not able to get 100% back), then sent us the data, but they are continuing to work on restoring the directory structure at no cost to us. Pretty cool. Hopefully they get there, but as I should be doing, I am planning for the worst.
What I do have is a bunch of files whose names are essentially the date and time they were either last modified or created (not sure which, I need to call them about that).
They are organized somewhat into first file types as such:
Office File Types
--->doc_docx
---------->2009
---------->2010
---------->2011
--->xls_xlsx
--->ppt_pptx
There is a hierarchy of major file types, minor(specific) file types, year, month, files.
Since I do not have a record of all the file names, we will have to rename them. This is not a huge issue (except when it comes to database files, including my exchange database which I am guessing is probably lost forever it it's original structure, but I salvaged all that data from cached .osts).
The only problem is going to be finding the actual files we need when we need them.
So the question is what types of search servers, or paradigms, do you guys recommend. We are a smaller business and do not have huge budgets, especially after the costs of the drive recovery.
I was thinking Google Enterprise Search server, but not sure how well it performs. I found a few on eBay that look like pretty good deals; however, I have no experience with it at all.
Thanks!
Mike