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.

Data Recovery – When to Call in the Pros

So you’ve suffered a data loss and you can’t get to your files. If you’re like far too many people, you probably don’t have easy access to a backup from which you can restore your files. If you don’t have backups, you’ve got two basic options to recover your lost files from your hard drive. If you can access the drive, you may be able to use data recovery software to get your files back, but it may not always be your best option.

Your other data recovery option is to call in the pros. There are many companies that specialize in recovering files from all sorts of hard drives and media devices. These data recovery services, such as Fields Data Recovery, often have a great deal of success in recovering data from even the most damaged devices. On the other hand, professional data recovery services – even at their best prices – can be expensive. How do you decide whether to call in the pros to handle your lost data woes?

Can You Access Your Hard Drive?

If your drive spins up, if your computer recognizes it and if you can access the hard drive at all, there’s a possibility that you may be able to recover your missing files yourself. There are many data rescue utilities on the market, both free and paid. But be aware that any attempt you make to access those files or restore them may make it more difficult to recover them if you end up sending your disk out to a professional service.

If you can’t access the files or if the drive doesn’t spin up at all, recovering data from it is a job for the pros. It’s practically impossible for a layman without access to special equipment to recover files from a dead hard drive. But before you simple send it out to a pro outfit, continue reading.

How Important Is Data Recovery in this Situation?

Before you make a single attempt to recover the data yourself, consider how important the missing files are to you or your company. Whether or not the disk is accessible, you need to decide how much your company is willing to lay out to restore your data.

If the drive is accessible, but the files aren’t mission-critical, you can make a copy of the data and attempt to recover your data from the copy. That way, if you later decide that those files are more valuable than you thought, you’ll have the original hard drive.

If the drive isn’t accessible at all, but the files aren’t mission critical, you may decide not to spend the money to retrieve the files. In that case, you can attempt to reconstruct the most important files from other sources, but you’ve essentially decided to do without them.

If the drive is inaccessible and the data on it is vital to your company, your only choice is to find a reliable, well-regarded data recovery service such as Fields Associates and contract with them to do the job.

Will Data Recovery Work for That?

If something goes wrong with your computer’s hard drive, chances are you know that you can use data recovery software – or in a pinch, a data recovery service – to get your files back. Hard drive data recovery works for PC drives, as well as server drives and RAID drives that power multiple networks. But what if the data loss isn’t on your computer? Would you know how to recover data if you, say… dropped your digital camera off a ledge and damaged it? How about if you accidentally washed your favorite jeans – with your pen drive still latched to the belt loop?

The good news is that there’s a good chance your files can be recovered no matter the media they’re stored on. The bad news is that you might have to resort to a professional data recovery company like Fields Data Recovery to get the job done. A great deal depends on the file system and whether or not you can actually access the drive at all. If you’re unsure about whether a data recovery program or Fields Associates data recovery services can get your files back, here are some more specifics about various types of file storage media and devices.

Data Recovery from a Laptop Hard Drive

As long as the hard drive is a standard SATA drive, recovering data is no more complicated than it is to recover files from a desktop PC. Solid state drives, on the other hand, are becoming more popular. Recovering files from a solid state drive is more difficult and should be left to professionals.

If you choose to attempt to restore the files yourself, be sure that you copy the entire drive first, then work from the copy instead of the original drive. That way, if your attempts are unsuccessful, you can still ship the original drive to a service that specializes in data recovery.

Recovering Data from a Memory Card

If you can access the card with a card reader, it may be possible to recover the lost files yourself. It’s simply a matter of using data recovery software to pull the files from the damaged card and restore them to your hard drive. But just because you can’t access the files, that doesn’t mean they’re completely lost. Often, a professional will still be able to access and restore your files.

The same applies for digital camera hard drives, your iPod or other MP3 player – even damaged CDs and DVDs. In fact, if you happen upon an old 5.25-inch floppy – the old cardboard and film ones – there’s an excellent chance that a professional data recovery service can pull the data from it.

If you’ve lost data from any type of storage media, you can attempt to restore it using a third-party data recovery utility. If all else fails, though, a data recovery professional is your best hope to get your files back.