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.