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.