Data loss can take quite a few forms – deletion by accident, failure of a hard drive, bugs in the software, corruption of data, hacking and even a power failure can all cause there to be a loss of data. Of course, those aren’t the only things. There are more extreme cases, such as when a hard drive has been in a fire or other disaster. Sometimes, data can even be recovered in cases such as that.
Do you know what data recovery is? It can be defined as the process of restoring lost data or data that has been deleted by accident or made inaccessible or corrupted for any reason. This typically refers to data that is located on a laptop, desktop, server, or even an external storage system or from a backup.
The process for data recovery can vary depending on the circumstances of the loss as well as the software that will be used to make the backup and the target media for the backup. As an example, many laptop and desktop backup software platforms will allow for the end users to restore their lost data and files themselves, but the restoration of a database that has been corrupted from a tape backup is more of a complicated process that will require IT intervention. However, data recovery can also be a service that is provided, like remote data recovery services. These services will generally be used to recover important files and data that had not been backed up and have been deleted from the file system of a computer by accident but might yet remain on the disk in fragments.
Disaster Recovery Plans
The disaster recovery plan for any organization needs to include providing a strategy for how the data will be recovered while also documenting acceptable recovery time and recovery point objectives.
Recovery Software
We mentioned recovery software a bit earlier. There are quite a few different options for this type of software. All of them have their good points as well as their drawbacks. The thing is, they are supposed to ease your mind when it comes to recovering data that has been lost. Will they all be able to recover every bit of data that has been lost? No. Will they be able to recover what you need? That depends on how religiously you backed up your information.
Data Recovery Services
If there is a piece of data that used to be located on your hard drive, USB flash drive, solid state drive, RAID, or other type of storage media, you can hire one of the data recovery specialists out there to perform data recovery to try to retrieve that data. Of course, this won’t always be something that is possible. There are times when the system will just be too corrupted or damaged to get any of the data back. That being said, data recovery technology has recently become very advanced, so you never know what can be recovered.
In Conclusion
A loss of data is something that none of us ever wants to go through. Unfortunately, many of us will at one point or another. Whether it is simply a lost USB flash drive that we might have failed to backup or we accidentally delete a folder that it critical to our business, there are potential hazards everywhere. Your first step in protection against this eventuality is prevention.
Data loss is almost totally preventable and if you want to prevent it, then it is critical that you have a good backup plan in place. Remember DATA RECOVERY WILL NEVER BE AN ALTERNATIVE TO BACKING YOUR DATA UP! Data recovery will be able to get some of your data most of the time, but you will have to pay for it. That being said, nearly all data will be recoverable in some form – with the only obstacles being money and time. The more money and time you can provide, the better your odds.
