Recovering from Disaster
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- Hidden Costs
- Death of the Phonebook
- Instant Messenger: A Kids Toy No Longer
- Synchronizing your Email
- Secure Remote Access to the Office
- The Document That Could Save Your Business
- The Looming Disaster of a Full Hard Drive
- Recovering from Disaster
- Preventing Disaster with Layered Backups
- Fire the Post Office
- Viruses Are Eating Your Profit
- Google Docs: The Replacement for Microsoft Office
- eMail Confidential
- Total Cost of Ownership
A weekend of relaxing with the family recharged your batteries. Refreshed and ready to go you sit down at your desk and fire up the computer. Minutes pass and all that appears on screen is a blinking cursor. Your great mood turns sour and suddenly your replenished energy dissipates into panic. With shaky fingers you dial your trusty computer specialist. The technician hears the panic in your voice and quickly assuages your fears by calmly stating, "Don't worry we can just run a data recovery and get your data back."
The Problem
Hard drives are one of the last mechanical devices in a modern computer. We all have enough experience with mechanical devices to know that eventually they will wear out and fail. Anyone who has purchased a new car only to take it in to the mechanics weeks later for repairs can testify to the fact that mechanical failures can happen at anytime. Computers compounding this problem by adding a software layer in the form of the operating system. The operating system can also malfunction leaving your computer in a state of uselessness. As we discussed last week, data backups can often prevent this headache. Unfortunately in most cases data backups are not implemented until after you experience a computer failure resulting in data loss.
Facts & Figures
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Software errors, mechanical failure and accidentally overwriting or deleting files can all lead to data loss. Each of these issues has a different solution.
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The most common cause of data loss is accidental deletion.
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Most backup software will not protect you from overwriting or version issues.
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Although hard drive vendors suggest the annual hard drive failure rate is less than 1%, a recent study has shown the real world rate is closer to 13%. This means statistically that businesses with 10 computers will experience hard drive failure in one of them a year.
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Data recovery costs for a failed hard drive range from $500 to more than $10,000.
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According to a Pepperdine Study, the annual cost of data loss to US businesses is $18 Billion.
The Solution
Data recovery increases in effort and corresponding costs in a linear fashion. This progression is as follows: accidental deletion, operating system errors, and finally mechanical errors. Methods for recovering lost data exist in each case, however the cost of recovery must be evaluated in terms of the value of the lost data.
In the most straightforward case you can open the Recycle Bin (Windows) or the Trash (Mac) and restore deleted files. It is a common occurrence that the files are not discovered to be missing until after the Recycle Bin/Trash has been emptied. In this case off the shelf software exists to recover the files. Two caveats exist for this method. As more time passes from deletion to recovery attempt, your chances of a successful recovery decrease. Secondly, never recover lost files to the same drive that they disappeared from. For example if the files were on your C: drive do not recover these files back to the C: drive. For technical reasons that I won't go into here, this act can permanently and irreparably delete the very files you are trying to recover.
In the event that the operating system will no longer start, data can likely be recovered by simply removing the hard drive and attaching it to another working computer. Do not run the recovery disks provided by your computer manufacturer. This will permanently erase your data.
The worst case scenario is that the hard drive has experienced a mechanical failure. Hard drives work much like the vinyl records of years past. A disk spins beneath an arm that moves across the disk to retrieve data. If that arm touches the drive it leaves scratches and just like the vinyl records these scratches destroy the data that was on that part of the drive. The most common indicator of this problem is if you suddenly hear a clicking noise when you start your computer. Turn your computer off immediately and call for help if you hear this clicking. The only way to recover data from this type of data failure is to send the hard drive to a data recovery specialist that has "clean room" capabilities. As these recoveries tend to be expensive, you should contact your technical support provider before beginning this process.
For information on how to recover from a data loss, please contact Binary Business.
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