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.