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.