Dealing with Data Loss
No one wants data loss, but of all the internet savvy people I know, I have yet to meet one who has not, at some point, lost important information. This is unavoidable, and has nothing to do with the electronic age in particular. Think about it. Haven’t you ever lost a notebook for school, or maybe a report that you had to turn in? No matter what form our data takes, we will have to face the possibility of losing it. Fortunately the computer, unlike other mediums, provides us with data recovery utilities to cope with these disasters.
The best data recovery utility is one which prevents data loss before it happens by providing a backup copy. Really, any kind of file backup system can be considered a data recovery utility. There are many different methods of backup, which vary in complexity, expense, reliability, & physical location. The simplest data recovery utility is making a physical backup of important files. This can be done with a flash drive, which can then be carried with you, or put in a safe place. This has the advantage of portability, but isn’t really all that reliable of a data recovery utility.
A better idea is to backup on a physical hard drive. Utilities called Raid, or (Redundant Array of Independent Diskssystems), will automatically create an identical copy of your hard drive as you go along. This is great, because if one hard drive fails, you’ll still have all of your files on the other drive. Another kind of data recovery type is an offsite backup. This means that your computer logs into a server and uploads encrypted copies of its data on a nightly schedule. The data is secured and protected on the remote system. This has the advantage that if something were to happen to your building – say a fire, or an earthquake or other natural disaster, there would still be a perfect copy of your files existing elsewhere.
Of course, once you physically lose your data, you can still find a data recovery utility to use, but your chances of success are much lower. There is data recovery utility software which can search a damaged hard drive, or the fragments of an accidentally erased file, and will sometimes, at least partially, be able to recover what you have lost. Still, this kind of data recovery process only has a moderate success rate at best, so it’s always better to take precautions not to lose your data in the first place.