Do You Have the Capacity for Data Recovery of Critical Systems?

Data recovery is a vital part of any disaster recovery plan, and it’s especially important if your computer systems have been compromised by an outside agent. When your machines are attacked by a hacker, you may or may not see all of the effects immediately. Often, attackers make subtle alterations to your data or leave behind files that allow them entry to your servers even after you’ve detected the security breach. Your data recovery capability is essential to recovering from an attack, and it should include both your own ability to recover data from a backup and a professional data recovery company such as Fields Data Recovery to do complete restoration and recovery if your own methods fail to completely recover your files.

Ensuring Your Data Recovery Capability

There are a number of things your company can do to ensure that you can recover from a computer attack or a virus. Some of these are probably familiar to you, but every day, data recovery companies work on hard drives belonging to companies who have neglected some vital part of their data security plan.

Schedule Automatic Backups of All Essential Data

Most of your systems should be backed up to an outside disk or storage medium at least once a week. Any systems or files that change frequently, such as banking records and employment records, should be backed up more frequently.

Your backup plans should include the operating system, all of your application software and all the data on your machines. While you don’t have to include all three systems in the same backup procedure, all three systems should be backed up at least once a week. That ensures that you’ll have recent files from which you can restore your entire system if it’s compromised in some way.

It’s not enough to just set up a backup system and let it run, either. Every data recovery company can tell you horror stories about companies that thought they were religiously backing up all of their files – until they needed those backup files for data restoration. That’s when they found out that something had gone wrong with their system and they actually had no backups from which to do a quick restore. Test your backups and your restore disks frequently to make sure that you can actually restore your data from them – and establish a relationship with a company like Fields Data Recovery just in case you need them in the future.

Make sure that all of your key personnel are trained on the backup and data restoration processes. At the very least, every person in your company should be aware of what to do if they run into data problems, even if that thing is to immediately notify the IT department. Your IT department should have at least one alternative person who understands how to do a restoration if your system is compromised in case your IT security head is not available.

All of your backup tapes, hard drives and other backup media should be stored in a safe, offsite location that you can easily access in an emergency. The last thing you need is for your backup tapes and files to be destroyed in the same mishap that compromises your operating systems.

If all else fails, a professional data recovery company can almost always reconstruct much of your system and restore your files to usable condition. The best solution, however, is to set up your backups and disaster recovery process to not need them at all.

Tips for Successful Data Recovery

If your company depends on computer data for any part of your everyday operations, having a data recovery and backup plan is vital to managing your risk. While the best way to avoid losing your important data is to have an established backup routine, nothing is foolproof. Data recovery should be a part of your overall backup planning, and you should have a relationship with a data recovery company like Fields Data Recovery before you need them. In addition, there are a few things you can do to make it easier for a data recovery company to recover any lost files or data on your hard drives or servers.

Defragment Regularly

Running a defrag program on your computer regularly increases the chances for a data recovery to bring your files back from the dead. A defrag program goes through your hard drive and moves all the pieces of your files and folders to one location on your hard drive. That makes it easier for a data recovery tech to find all the pieces of each file and pull the data off. One caveat – do not run a defrag program if you suspect your hard drive is failing or if it has failed. If the drive is bad, you could end up wiping out the data you want to save and make it impossible for a tech to perform data restoration.

Backup Before Changing Anything

Before you make any hardware or software changes, do a full backup and validate it. If your computer is inaccessible after the change, you’ll have a valid backup to restore.

If your hard drive is making funny noises, turn your computer off immediately and call your data recovery company. Unusual noises signal a mechanical problem with your hard drive. Continuing to run the drive after it starts making noises can cause permanent damage and data loss.

Always restore any data to a different hard drive or location, not onto the hard drive that lost data.

If you are removing hard drives from a RAID array to ship them to a data recovery company or for any other reason, label the drive with its original position in the array.

If you suspect that a hard drive has gone bad, do not run a volume repair utility on it. You’ll risk wiping out any information that a data recovery company could retrieve.

What you do before and immediately following a data loss directly affects how successful any data recovery attempts may be. Make sure that anyone in your company who works with the computers and servers understands the procedure they should follow in case of data loss to increase the chances of a successful data recovery.

When Data Recovery Becomes An EmergencyBecomes

Losing important data is never fun, but it’s often a survivable event. Often, but not always, according to some of the major data recovery firms in the industry. In fact, a recent survey found that about 35 percent of companies who suffer a major data loss never recover – as in, they never return to doing business. Of those that do, another hefty percentage fail within the next two years. In a data-driven economy, the ability to quickly recover lost files and restore lost data isn’t just important to your business, it’s vital to your ability to do serve your customers. If you haven’t considered how you and your company would deal with a data recovery emergency, you could well find yourself unable to recover from it at all.

How Important is Data to Your Company?

A surprisingly large number of business owners don’t recognize the importance of their computer data to their company. If you do any computerized record-keeping, including customer relationship management, accounting, bookkeeping or order fulfillment, losing  your access to your company’s historical records could be crippling.

Most companies have been far quicker to adopt computerized record-keeping and order-fulfillment than they have been to institute ways to safeguard that information. If your database fails or a hard drive containing customer orders goes down, how would your company know which customers ordered what items? If you lose access to your bookkeeping records or your accounts payables file becomes corrupt, how would you reconstruct your billing records? If you’re not sure of the answers to these questions, it’s time for you to consider developing a data recovery plan for your business.

Five Steps to a Workable Data Recovery Plan

Step 1: Identify data that is vital to your company. Which missing files have the potential to cripple your company’s day to day operations?

Step 2: Create redundancy. Set up your network so that the most important files are regularly saved in more than one place. Turn on versioning in your software so that at the very least, you’ll be able to pull up an earlier version of your data if something goes wrong with the current file.

Step 3: Develop a backup plan – that is, a plan to back up your data regularly. At the very least, you should be backing up the files identified in the first step at least once a day. Those backup files should be stored offsite in a safe place. And don’t forget a way to restore the data you’ve saved if something should go wrong.

Step 4: Test your data backup plan regularly. Data recovery firms like Fields Data Recovery frequently hear tales of data backups that failed, equipment that didn’t work and media that was accidentally erased. Run “fire drills” to make sure that your data backups are being run and that the information is recoverable.

Step 5: Identify a data recovery company to contact in the event that your backup and data recovery plans fail.

Identifying a reliable and reputable data recovery company in advance means that you’re not under the gun to find a good option in the middle of an emergency. Planning ahead can help avert some of the worst data recovery emergencies. Knowing where to turn can alleviate their long-term effects.

Data Recovery Options – The Sooner the Better

Most companies who face a data loss emergency put off calling in a data recovery company as long as possible, often after doing things that makes it harder to retrieve the data they need, according to a major data recovery company. Companies like Fields Data Recovery note that the average data retrieval project can be done in less than 48 hours, and the success rate for data recovery is about 85% -- but when a company or individual has attempted to recover the lost data before contacting the data recovery firm, those odds drop, and the job can take weeks.

The Worst Response – Do Nothing

The most common problem response to early data loss is doing nothing at all. That’s often because people fail to recognize that any data loss is a signal that something is going wrong. Lost files, inaccessible files and other data access issues often signal the beginnings of an underlying problem with a hard disk. If it’s dealt with immediately and properly, it’s possible to avoid having to deal with a major data loss emergency. If it’s left to get worse, however, it could become a major problem. In fact, a Philadelphia accounting firm estimates that 43 percent of companies that have a major data center disaster shut down and never reopen.

Avoiding the Need for Data Recovery

Only one in four data recovery emergencies happen because of software corruption, computer viruses and actual physical disasters like fire and floods. The remaining 75% are due to either a hardware/system malfunction or human error. A few steps can help you reduce the chances of needing a data retrieval firm.

First, of course, your company should have an ongoing backup procedure to ensure that all of your important data is being saved so that it can be restored in case of an emergency. Having a backup plan or solution, however, is useless if it’s not working right or if people aren’t using it. It’s important to do regular checks to make sure that the hardware is working and the backup software is actually capturing the data. Every day, data recovery companies get at least one telephone call from someone who thought the data was being backed up.

Secondly, keep data center computers – your backup and network servers – in clean, low-traffic areas to reduce accidents and equipment failures. Avoid things that can damage the computers physically, for example, don’t allow food or drink anywhere near the machines.

Do regular backups – and verify them to make sure that you’re capturing the important data. Install virus scan software and use it regularly. Create undo disks whenever you install new software so that you can easily reverse a change if it leads to a compromise in your system.

Make sure that all of your employees understand the importance of data safety, and that those who are directly responsible for backups and data recovery have the right training and tools to do their jobs properly.

Finally, recognize the symptoms of data loss and get immediate help from a data recovery service when it happens. The sooner you call in the pros to recover vital data, the better the chances are that they’ll be able to get your data back.

Steps to Prevent Data Recovery Problems

The best way to avoid the cost of shipping your hard drives out to a data recovery company is to be proactive in making sure that you’ll never need data retrieval services. You can greatly reduce the chances that you’ll have to lay out the bucks to recover your lost database or your company’s customer records by following some best data security practices. If the worst happens, though, and you need to restore data to your hard drives and other data devices, knowing what to do will ensure that you don’t accidentally make it impossible for your chosen data recovery company to retrieve any data at all. These tips will help you preserve the data that’s vital to you, even if you do need data recovery services.

Make an operating system recovery disk. Windows gives you the option to create a recovery disk that you can use to restore the drivers and restart your computer if it fails to start. Do it. One of the most common reasons for data loss is an operating system failure and subsequent formatting of the hard drive.

Use Restore Points liberally. Your Windows PC creates automatic restore points to make it easy for you to back your computer up to an earlier date. You can also create your own. Make it a practice to create a restore point before you install any new program or hardware on your computer.

Set up regular backups. Use built-in utilities to backup your computer frequently, but remember the limitations of backups kept on your hard drive. At least once a week, back up your entire hard drive to a secondary drive or an online backup vault. In between, backup copies of important files, such as customer databases and records, that change frequently.

Protect your computer from physical damage. In most cases, if your data loss occurs because of a software error, you can probably do the data recovery job yourself. If it’s the result of physical damage to the drive, however, it’s a job for data recovery pros.

If you can’t access your hard drive at all, don’t try to recover the data on it yourself. Every attempt you make to retrieve data from a non-functioning hard drive carries the risk of destroying the data completely.

If you don’t have backups and can’t access your hard drive, contact a data recovery company such as Fields Data Recovery and follow their recommendations for shipping your hard drive to them for a full data recovery operation.

Laptop Data Recovery and Security Tips

If you regularly use a laptop, you may be more likely to need the services of a professional data recovery service than desktop users. Laptops used to be exotic and expensive alternatives to desktop computers, but in the past few years, they’ve come into their own. Today, laptops often function as desktop replacements, with tablets coming up fast as the newest, easiest computers for people to use. For all the conveniences they offer, laptops are also more prone to problems than desktops for many reasons. If you typically use a laptop or tablet and carry important files and data on it, you should take extra precautions to safeguard your data to avoid the need for data recovery software and services.

Set Up Automatic Backups for Your Laptop

Set up your laptop to perform automatic backups of your data during the times that you’re least likely to be using it. Many laptop manufacturers include a data backup utility to make it easy for you, or you can set up automatic backups through an online service that will store your file backups on remote servers. Current backups are your best insurance against the need for expensive data recovery services.

Carry Your Laptop in a Laptop Bag

It’s tempting to drop your laptop – especially the new, smaller netbooks and mini-notebooks – into your purse or backpack. Avoid the temptation and always use a bag designed to transport a laptop safely. Laptop bags have padding and straps to keep your computer from being banged and jostled, either of which could cause damage to your hard drive and result in data loss.

Be Careful Where You Put Your Laptop

It’s far easier to knock over a laptop than it is to drop a desktop. Dropped laptops are among the most common problems that data recovery technicians see in their work. A drop from desk height is enough to badly damage your hard drive, making the data on it completely inaccessible.

Be Careful What You Put Near Your Laptop

Laptops are also more prone to spills than desktops. That’s partly because they’re more likely to sit on tables and partly because people are more likely to carry them along when they go to the coffee shop or out to lunch. Spilled coffee or soda can short out the electrical components on your laptop and may gum up your hard drive and make it impossible to access.

If the worst happens and you end up unable to access or open files on your laptop, don’t try to fix it yourself. Call in a professional data recovery operation, like Fields Data Recovery, to work on your computer and retrieve the files for you.

First Steps in Data Recovery from Flash Drives

Flash drives, also known as USB drives and thumb drives, are among the handiest little devices ever created. While they haven’t eliminated the need for data recovery services, they’ve certainly reduced the occurrence of data loss that used to be incredibly common.

It’s hard to believe that just a dozen short years ago, your only option for carrying computer files with you from one machine to another was the floppy disk – a horribly and easily corruptible data storage device that were more prone to data loss than just about any media storage device ever created. All it took was one little spill to wipe out the dozens of documents saved on those little plastic disks – and sometimes not even that.  For instance, some people had recurring problems with thier 3.5” floppys erasing over and over. They would copy information to a disk, drop the disk in a pocket with a cell phone, which emitted just enough of a magnetic electric field to erase the disk completely.

The advances in technology since then are amazing. Today’s flash drive or data card – not much bigger than your thumbnail – can hold as much data as we compiled on our library of hundreds of 3.5” floppies. Unfortunately, that also means that when something goes wrong, you’re prone to losing a whole lot more data than your homework for tomorrow’s class. Recovering that data can be tricky, but there are some steps you can take to make data recovery from a non-functioning flash drive easier.

First, do not save anything else to that drive. Every particle of data that you save will get written to the disk, and you run the risk of overwriting data that you want to recover. Remove the drive from your computer, just to be on the safe side, while you do the next few steps.

Download data recovery software onto your computer and install it. You can find many free data recovery software titles that can help you explore your thumb drive and attempt to recover the files from it.

Insert the thumb drive into the USB slot on your computer. Start the data recovery software and follow the instructions for finding and saving the files you need to your hard drive.

If you can’t access the flash drive at all, stop trying. It’s a job for data recovery professionals, such as those at Fields Data Recovery. Contact Fields Data Recovery for instructions on how to package and ship your drive to them, as well as a quote on what their data recovery services will cost.

Important Data Recovery and Disaster Preparedness Findings

Symantec, one of the world’s best known names in the field of data protection, recently released a report on the state of disaster preparedness and data recovery options for small and medium businesses. They surveyed almost 2,000 small and medium businesses about the effects that a data loss would have on their business and published the results in a January 2011 report. How does your business stack up against the typical SMB when it comes to being prepared with a data recovery and security plan?

Most Businesses Have No Disaster Recovery, Data Security or Data Recovery Plan

According to the report, only half of the businesses surveyed have a disaster recovery plan that deals with data recovery. Of those, 14 percent have no intention of creating a plan, 25 percent say they’ll implement one in the next three to six months and 34 percent plan to implement a disaster and data recovery plan in the next three months. Despite the fact that nearly 50 percent of the SMBs have no data recovery plan in place, 84 percent believe that their computers are protected from data loss and over 80 percent are satisfied with their plans to deal with outages and disruptions caused by data loss.

Most Businesses Face Serious Loss Due to Data Loss and Insecurity

The risk of outages and disruptions due to data loss is a significant one. About 65 percent of all small and medium businesses are located in a region that is prone to natural disasters. The average SMB experienced six “outages” in the past year. The most common reasons for data loss – and a subsequent need for data recovery services – included cyberattacks,  unexpected power outages, employee errors and upgrades.

In addition, few companies are as protected in the area of data recovery as they believe they are. About half of the companies in the survey back up the majority of their data, fewer than half back up their data at least once a week and less than 25 percent back up their data every day. Even worse, many of them fail to back up really important data – the type that data recovery companies like Fields Associates are frequently called upon to restore. Greater than 30 percent don’t back up their email, over 20 percent don’t back up application data and over 15 percent don’t back up customer data. According to these companies, they’d lose at least 40 percent of their data in the event of a disaster that impacted their servers, computers and other devices.

Is your company protected in case of a data emergency? If you’re among the one-half of all small and medium businesses who have no data recovery plans in place, the time to act is now, before a disaster happens.

Data Recovery Myths and Facts

What does data recovery have in common with primitive religions and mythology? If you guessed “voodoo solutions”, you’d be half right. In prehistoric times, man created myths to explain phenomenon he could not understand. The more important something was in his life, the more likely it was that he’d create a myth to explain it – and some voodoo solution to prevent it from happening or recover from it. When you consider the importance of computers and the data that their hard drives and other media hold, it’s no wonder then, that there are so many myths about lost files and data recovery. Here are some of the best known myths about data recovery and the facts about them.

Myth: You can remove the hard drive platters from one drive and put them in another to read them.

It is possible, but not for most users. Hard drive cases should only be opened in a clean room, and only by professional hard drive data recovery professionals. Manufacturers calibrate the alignment of the disk platters and drive heads within thousandths of an inch to maximize performance. If you mess with the inner workings of a drive, you’re seriously compromising the ability of data recovery professionals to recover any of your lost data.

Myth: Lasers can read hard drive disks without opening the case.

Chalk this myth up under the “not yet” heading. There’s promising research using lasers and other external means to scan hard drives, but so far there’s nothing that’s practical for use even by commercial data recovery firms. It may happen someday, though, and it will eliminate the risks of opening a hard drive case.

Myth: Hard drive manufacturers guarantee recovery of data from a failed hard drive.

Unless there is a special arrangement for a particular company, manufacturers of hardware don’t cover the cost of data recovery under warranty agreements. In fact, most manufacturers explicitly exclude data from coverage under their warranties, and state that they are not responsible for data that’s lost or damaged during transit, repair or replacement of your hard drive. Back up your data regularly so that you can restore it to a new hard drive or to a hard drive after repair if necessary.

Myth: You can use data recovery software to recover data from a drive that has failed mechanically.

If a hard drive has failed or is failing mechanically, any attempts to access or recover data from that drive can further damage the data on the drive and make it more difficult to recover.

If your hard drive has failed or if you can’t access a hard drive for any reason, the best course of action is to call in a data recovery professional like Fields Data Recovery. Don’t try to go it alone or you risk making it impossible to recover data that you might otherwise have been able to save.

Data Recovery Tips for Small BusinessBusiness

If you run a small business, you’re more likely to need data recovery services than your bigger corporate brothers. Today, more and more small businesses rely on their computers and computer files to help them get information out to customers, keep track of accounts and cut their expenses. Computerization has made many of the parts of doing business easier. From accounting to publishing, the computer makes it easier for one person to handle most, if not all, of the tasks that used to require a full office staff. With one computer, you can handle the books and accounting, sales, communications and other parts of your business. However, this also makes your business more vulnerable to data loss and increases the likelihood that you’ll need data recovery services in the future.

Unlike larger businesses, these small business operations usually can’t afford such luxuries as fully redundant RAID drives and expensive data backup systems. When something goes wrong with their hard drives or other data storage devices, they often have no choice other than to turn to a professional data recovery service like Fields Data Recovery. In many cases, that’s an expensive option – and it’s made more expensive and difficult if the small business owner takes the wrong steps in trying to recover his lost files himself. In fact, in many cases, the business can avoid the need for data recovery services by taking a few important steps.

Backup, Backup and Backup Your Data

The biggest risk you can take with your business is to have only one set of up to date records. That’s why backing up your data regularly should be a vital part of your business routine. These days, it’s easier and less expensive to do than ever. In fact, it’s fairly easy to do a three-layer backup yourself, without taking a lot of your time.

Subscribe to an automatic backup service that backs up your files to an off-site computer every night. Most only cost a few dollars a month, and there are even free services you can use. If you’re willing to do a little bit of work yourself, you can even do nightly backups and transfer the backup to an online, off site server yourself.

Back up important files after any major changes to an external data storage device, such as an exterior hard drive or tape drive. You can set your computer to do this automatically, but be sure to check the backups regularly to ensure that they’re error-free and restorable.

Keep a second copy of your most important files on your computer, and use Save As to update the second copy whenever you make a significant change. That gives you immediate access to a backed up copy in the event you accidentally delete the file or can’t access it.

Practice Safe Data Recovery

You should also be aware that nearly anything you do with your hard drive after it starts to fail may make it more difficult for data recovery experts to retrieve any data from it in the event you are unsuccessful. If you can’t access the disk at all, your best option is to contact a reputable data recovery firm, such as Fields Data Recovery, and follow their instructions to the letter.

Data Recovery from Solid State Drives

Solid state drive technology is moving into more and more arenas, and with good reason. SSD is increasingly used in mobile devices and often replaces traditional hard disk drives in high-quality laptops, netbooks and desktop computers. While SSDs offer many advantages for data storage, they also offer exceptional challenges for data recovery, according to data recovery professionals. The traditional methods of data recovery don’t work with solid state drives, which rely on a completely different method of storing data than do hard disk drives.

Solid State Drives vs. Hard Disk Drives

SSDs were originally developed for military use, and later adapted for use in MP3 players, USB drives and memory cards, including those commonly used in camcorders, digital cameras and phones. They differ drastically from hard drive disks, which store data on magnetically charged disks. SSDs instead use a solid-state semiconductor, such as a memory chip or other electrically erasable RAM devices. Because they don’t use moving parts nor require synchronization among moving parts, SSDs boot up more quickly, access files more quickly, launch applications more quickly and move data more quickly, and do so while using less energy. This means faster operation and longer battery life.

Data Loss and Data Recovery on Hard Drives

Hard drives are more susceptible to data loss as a natural consequence of mechanical wear, among other things. There are two types of hard drive failures that lead to a need for data recovery – logical failures, such as accidentally deleted files, corrupted data, software errors and corrupted data; and mechanical failures that happen because of physical damage to the drive – scratched disks, for example. While it’s easier to lose data from a hard drive, data recovery is also generally relatively easy. Even in cases of actual physical failure, which requires the work of a data recovery professional, most of the data can often be recovered.

SSD Data Recovery – Less Often Necessary but Harder to Do

Since SSDs don’t have any moving parts, they’re far less likely to suffer from mechanical failure than hard drives, and thus far less likely to suffer data loss. When it does happen, however, it’s usually because of electrical damage, firmware corruption or controller failure. Of course, you can still accidentally delete files or get a virus that corrupts your files. Unfortunately, the very things that make SSDs more efficient and faster also make data recovery harder. Unlike hard drives, which can overwrite data, SSDs must erase data before writing new data to a section on the drive. In order to maximize performance, many SSDs periodically “clean up” the drive by erasing orphaned blocks of data, making it far less likely that data recovery professionals can find and recover the data that was originally written to them.

Data recovery experts use proprietary methods to recover as much data as possible even from solid state drives, and many have remarkable success at doing so. If you’ve lost data from a device that stores it on an SSD and think it’s irretrievably gone, check with a data recovery expert such as Fields Data Recovery, before giving up on it. There have been surprising strides in data recovery technology that allow professionals to retrieve data from many SSDs.

Data Recovery in the Era of Cloud Computingthe

Cloud computing is the wave of the future, or at least it appears to be. It offers many advantages over traditional methods of networking and application use, and it can be more secure, suggests a former information security officer for the Justice Department, but you shouldn’t rely on cloud computing for disaster recovery. You can make automated data storage a part of your disaster recovery plans and business continuity planning, but be sure to also make a plan for traditional data recovery services.

Cloud computing can make post-disaster data recovery easier in some cases, but it’s best not to count on it exclusively. If you haven’t already developed a disaster recovery plan that includes data retrieval, there’s not time better than before disaster strikes.

First Steps in a Post-Disaster Data Recovery Plan

All data is not created equal. Your company won’t suffer much if you lose the file of job descriptions, most of which exist in hard copy. The loss of the customer order files, on the other hand, could put a significant crimp in your business.

The first step in creating a post-disaster data recovery plan is to classify your data by its importance to your company so that you can assign it a level of priority for backup and recovery.

Create a backup plan and institute backup procedures and policies based on the priorities you identified. As part of that plan, identify the roles that each person on your data recovery team will fill. Make sure that each person understands the importance of carrying out his or her assigned role and give them ownership of it. The biggest pitfall in designing backup plans is employees who are not fully on board with or accountable for the data recovery plan you’ve come up with.

Always, always, always check your backups periodically to be sure that they’re running right if they’re automated, and that they can actually be restored. An IT chief’s worst nightmare is popping in the backup tape to restore lost data only to find that the file is corrupt or an error prevents your system from doing a full restore.

Identify a data recovery firm, such as Fields Associates, to handle data recovery chores that can’t be handled onsite. Don’t wait till it’s too late to identify the right company to handle your data recovery problems. You’ll have more perspective and time to make the right choice when you’re not panicked by an emergency.

Why Data Recovery Solutions Are Vital to Your OperationVital

Data recovery is something no one wants to think about before the need for it smacks them in the face. Unfortunately for most businesses and organizations, by that time, it’s too late for DIY data recovery solutions and they have to turn to a professional data recovery specialist. If your organization depends on its computer files, it’s vital that you put some thought into data recovery solutions so that your entire workforce – even if it’s just you and your computer – knows what to do if the computer crashes or they accidentally delete an important file or database. If you’re not sure whether or not data is important to your operation, think about the way that you use the files on your network hard drives and your computer every day and then consider what it would cost you to have to work without them.

Accounting Records

Do you do your books in Quicken or any other accounting or bookkeeping program? These programs allow you to easily print out invoices, pull up reports about your customer base, generate profit and loss statements and other accounting tools, and manage your books from one easy interface. What happens if you suddenly can’t access your company’s books? How many days would it take your company to reconstruct those records from paper trails? Safeguarding those important files is vital to your business.

Letterheads, Templates and Company Boilerplates

Many small businesses save money on stationery by keeping their letterhead in a word processing template. Others use templates for grant applications, invoices, brochures and other important business tools. From one-pagers to business reports, most organizations keep hundreds of hours worth of work on their network hard drives. If that suddenly became inaccessible to you, how long would it take to put it all back together? Days? Weeks? How much time would it end up costing your business to lose all of the papers it relies on in its daily operation?

Those are only a few examples of the way companies rely on their computer files without even thinking about it. If your hard drive crashed today, could you run your business effectively?

Unfortunately, when something goes wrong, most people panic and attempt to recover the data themselves. All too often, their efforts end up making the files even more inaccessible. Every one of your employees needs to know the steps to take if something goes wrong, or you risk them taking steps that will make it impossible for even a professional data recovery company to bring them back.

If you have a data emergency, contact a professional data recovery company for advice on the best way to proceed. They’ll be able to advise you on safe steps you can attempt on your own and let you know if you need professional help to retrieve your lost or inaccessible files.

Risk Management Plan for Data Recovery After a Disaster

When most people think about data recovery, they don’t usually consider the effects of natural disasters. Their data recovery plans may take into account a lost file, a crashed hard drive or the occasional oops that happens when you push the wrong button in your database program. The fact is, though, that lost data makes up a large part of the economic damage suffered by businesses when a natural disaster strikes, especially if they haven’t thought ahead to ensure that their data is backed up and safe.

This year has been an especially terrible one for natural disasters – floods, earthquakes, fires, tornadoes and even volcanoes have shut down businesses, destroyed physical property and affected the data storage that most companies today rely on to run their businesses. If you’ve never considered how safe your data is before, the fact that a violent storm lasting less than 10 minutes can destroy your entire office, all of your computer equipment and, if you haven’t taken the step of backing up your data in a secure place, year’s worth of records that are vital to your business. If you haven’t already done so, you should make sure that you have a data recovery plan for floods and other natural disasters so that you can get back up and running as quickly as possible after a disaster strikes.

The most important aspect of an effective data recovery plan is backup planning. There are three types of backup plans, and your company may use one, two or parts of all three. Each has advantages and disadvantages you should consider with your information technology team.

Incremental backups save the most current and important data, or may back up one computer or hard drive at a time. It’s the least secure type of backup, but it’s also the quickest.

Differential backups go through your computer files and only save anything that’s changed since the last time you performed a full backup. Differential backups are a good idea if you have access to your current files or to all of the backups, but they can take a long time to restore in full because you need to apply all of the backups when you attempt to do a complete data recovery routine.

A full backup saves all of the data from all of your computers and databases so that you can restore the data completely if you suffer a major data loss. Full backups can take hours – even days – if your company has lots of data and computers. They’re the most reliable, but it’s seldom efficient to do full backups on a regular, frequent basis.

The best data recovery plans start with a reasonable mix of the three types of backup to ensure that you’ll always be able to restore your computer files and systems as close to their current state as possible. Your IT department should assess the risks to your computers and devise a backup plan that makes the most sense.

The second important leg of a data recovery plan for your company is offsite data storage. The best backup plan in the world is useless if the backups are destroyed in the same disaster that destroys your current data. There are many options available for storing your data out of harm’s way, including online data storage options that will store your data anywhere in the world.

The final leg of a data recovery plan is a plan for restoring the data if necessary.

If, despite your best efforts – or in the absence of them – you find yourself with lost data and no backup for restoration, identify a competent and reliable data recovery service, such as Fields Data Recovery, that can recover the data from your damaged disks, tapes or drives.

Data Recovery Tips for New Media Devices

Just when you think you’ve finally got the hang of how to go about hard drive data recovery, the high tech industry has to go and throw you a curve ball. It’s not enough to back up your hard drive anymore. These days, it seems like almost everything has a hard drive that can lose data. You can lose pictures off your camera, your contact list off your cell phone and a whole semester’s worth of papers – or your thesis– of a flash drive. If you’ve ever gone to boot up a device on which you depend and had it sit there, giving you a blank, dead stare, you know the sinking feeling of desperation it can engender. But before you call in the data recovery pros, there are a few things you can try.

Turn It Off And On

Turn the device off and back on. It’s the same as rebooting your computer. Sometimes a glitch prevents the operating system that controls your media storage device from opening up properly. If it happens once, it could just be a glitch. If it starts to happen more often, take it as a sign that you need to replace the hard drive in your camera, phone or other device. Transfer all the info to a new sim card or flash drive to avoid having to send it out to a data recovery service.

Try Opening The Storage Media in Another Device

If you have the option, try opening the files another way. Pop the storage card out of your camera and see if your computer will open it. If you’ve tried plugging it in on your laptop and it doesn’t open, try the card or flash drive in another card reader or USB port, or on a different computer. You can even try popping your telephone Sim card into a compatible cell phone. The problem may be with the reader and not the media. If that’s the case, you haven’t lost your files – you just need to figure out what’s wrong with your device.

If You Can Read The Drive But Not Open Files…

If you can read the drive, but can’t open or access the files on it, you may be able to get to them with a data recovery software program. Start by copying the entire drive to another drive so that you’re not working on your original media. The more you attempt to recover data, the greater the chances are that you’ll delete something permanently. If you can copy the files onto another drive, you can work on that and not risk deleting the files on your original media.

Download the software program onto your computer, but not onto the affected drive. Follow the program instructions to try to recover your lost files.

Contact Data Recovery Specialists

If you’ve tried those and it’s a no go, your only option may be to contact a professional data recovery service, such as Fields Data Recovery. They have the tools and the experience to recover almost any data from a wide variety of media storage types, including MP3 players, flash drives, cameras and phone SIM cards.

Top Five Data Recovery and Data Security Tips

Data security is about more than preventing hackers from getting into your server and making off with proprietary secrets or your customers’ credit card data. Securing your data means protecting yourself from any type of data loss, including accidental wipeouts when something goes wrong with your hard drive. If data is important to your business at all – from photographs to customer orders – then you need to have a data security and data recovery plan in place. Teaching how to deal with a data recovery emergency, as well as taking steps to prevent one in the first place, should be part of the training for every employee in your business that deals with collecting and accessing data.

Set Up Automatic Data Backups on All Your Computers

Anticipation is the key to avoiding expensive data recovery services. Make sure that every data device your business uses is backed up regularly. With PCs, subscribing to an automatic data backup service will take the need to remember out of your hands, and the hands of your employees, and make sure it gets done every day.

Set Firm Policies to Protect Your Data Physically

One of the most common causes of data loss is physical damage from things like spilled beverages and crumbs which can spell bad news for your computers. Be on the safe side and insist that food, drink and cigarette smoke be kept away from your computers.

Provide Protective Cases for Laptops and PDAs

A dropped laptop or dunked smart phone or PDA can result in the loss of important client contact information and emails. If you supply your employees with laptops, cell phones or PDAs, provide protective cases to help keep your investment, and the data they carry, safe.

Educate Your Employees on Data Recovery Procedures

The first actions you take after you realize that you’ve lost a file or can’t access important data can determine whether data recovery professionals can get your information back for you. Make sure that every one of your employees is aware of what they should do if they can’t access important files to prevent them accidentally making matters worse when they try to recover the data themselves.

Identify a Trustworthy Data Recovery Service Before You Need One

Your data recovery plan should include who to contact and what to do in a data recovery emergency. The last thing you need to be doing when you’re frantic about your lost files is trying to identify a trustworthy data recovery firm. Take the time to explore data recovery services, such as Fields Data Recovery, before you need them so you’ll know who to all when you need them.

Protect Your Data Tips from Fields Data Recovery

The data techs at Fields Data Recovery, one of the world’s premier data retrieval companies, note that most data losses are preventable. Data recovery can be an expensive and time-consuming proposition. You can avoid the expense – and other losses incurred by data loss and compromised data – by following these tips to help you keep your data safe. If you’re proactive about protecting your data, you may never need data recovery services from professionals like those at Fields Data Recovery.

Back Up Data Regularly

There’s really no excuse not to back up your data these days. As little as 10  years ago, backing up your computers was a time-consuming process. Many companies employed people whose main responsibility was doing regular backups of all the company’s servers – a process that could easily take 8 or more hours daily. Today, backing up your data can be as simple as signing up with a service that does it all for you automatically at the time intervals you choose. A current data backup makes file restoration painless – you just restore your backed up files from the last file backup.

Protect Your Data from Intrusion

IT security is vital to protect your data from theft, but it also prevents malicious mischief. One of the most common causes of data loss is virus contamination, including deliberate attacks on your server or your personal computer. Always make sure that every computer on your network is protected by the latest virus protection and firewalled against intrusion from outside the network to prevent data loss that requires hiring a data recovery professional to restore your files.

Store a Backup Offsite

Backing up your files regularly is only one part of keeping your data safe. Having a file backup in your office is great if something happens to your computer – but what if something happens to your office? A flood, fire or other natural disaster could easily destroy both your computers and your backup disks. The solution is to always store a recent backup of your files in a remote location where they can’t be damaged by a disaster at your main site. The best and easiest solution is a remote backup program that automatically backs up all of your files to an online server.

Protect Your Files from Physical Damage

The second most common cause of data loss – and a prime reason for needing data recovery services – is spilled drinks. Make a rule – and enforce it – that there is no food, drink or smoking around the computers in your office to protect your hard drive from being accidentally damaged by a spill or a buildup of crumbs.

If you take care of your computer’s hard drive and protect your files properly, chances are, you’ll never need the assistance of a data recovery company. If something does happen, the experts at a company like Fields Data Recovery are there to help.

Data Recovery for the Totally Clueless

Most people like to think that they’ll never have to worry about using a data recovery service. They believe that their machines are infallible, or that no matter what they do to their computer or other data device, it will always boot back up if you turn it off and back on again. And they’re usually right. Today’s operating systems are quite good about backing up data for you so that you can usually restore your computer to an operable state with just a few steps. 

Every once in a while, though, something really bad happens to your device, and no matter what you do, you can’t find the file you lost, or get your computer to start up when you turn it on, or get it to go past the opening screen. When that happens, you may need the magic touch of a professional data recovery team like the pros at Fields Data Recovery. Before you call in the pros, though, there are a few things you can try.

If You Accidentally Deleted a File

It happens to the best of us – a little slip of the mouse and – oh, no! You’ve just deleted the paper that’s due tomorrow and that you’ve slaved over all week long. There’s no need to panic – yet. When you tell Windows to delete a file, the operating system doesn’t actually delete it immediately. Instead, it “moves” it to your Recycle Bin just in case you really didn’t mean it. If you accidentally deleted a file, or if you went to open it and it’s just not there, your first step is to check your Recycle Bin to see if it’s there. You’ll find your Recycle Bin on your Desktop. Just double-click on it to open it and check the list of files. If your file is there, right-click on it to open the context menu, and click on Restore File to put it back where it belongs.

If it’s not there – say, because you already emptied the Recycle Bin, or because you deleted it from your mailbox, which doesn’t empty to the Recycle Bin – you still don’t have to panic. Depending on how long it’s been since you deleted the file, there’s a good chance that it’s still there. When you permanently delete a file, Windows doesn’t actually delete it. Instead, it marks the first sector to let the computer know that it can reuse the segments of the disk on which the data is written. The chances of the data actually being overwritten increase with time and computer use. That’s why the first thing you need to do when you realize that your file is neither where it should be nor in the Recycle Bin is to stop using your computer.

From there, you have two choices. You can either attempt to recover your data using data recovery software, or you can call in a pro operation like Fields Data Recovery services. Because attempts to recover data from a hard drive can actually wipe out the data you’re trying to recover if you’re not careful, you should always contract with a professional data recovery service if your data is irreplaceable or vitally important.