Protecting Your Data from Data Disasters

Whether you’re directly in the data business or not, safeguarding data is crucial. We’re not necessarily talking about sensitive data, such as customer addresses and credit card numbers. Rather, we’re talking about data that is vitally important to your company’s health and, if it were to disappear for good, could spell doom for your entire operation.

There are two distinct elements to maintaining data: backup and recovery. With proper data backup, you generally won’t need data recovery, but even the best-laid plans can go south. Top security experts will tell you that even the most secure data backup can fail or be compromised.

If and when that happens, that’s when the priority shifts to data recovery. At this point, your data is lost, but hopefully, it’s not beyond recovering. There are unique methods and tools designed for retrieving data that’s ostensibly been erased.

Let’s look at some specific strategies and techniques that prove effective when handling data.

Data Backup

Redundant backups are an absolute must if you claim to take data backup seriously. Having a single backup, regardless of how complete it is, is not an effective method of protecting your company data. In this situation, you have only your original data, on your company’s servers, as well as one backup set, either on a different server (hopefully) or on a piece of storage media. It’s not far-fetched for something to happen to both of these sets of data. In fact, it’s entirely possible for the same piece of malware to erase data from both locations.

It’s essential to have multiple backups of your data, and for those backups to be stored in a variety of locations, preferably all over the globe. The more degrees of separation between your various backup locations, the better. Never underestimate how widespread a data-breaching incident can be. (Tom’s Guide)

This doesn’t have to be an expensive solution, either. Effective data backup is not only for large corporations. Regardless of how small your business might be, you always have the option of copying your data to multiple hard drives and storing them at separate locations. The same goes for uploading your data to various cloud servers. Again, the key is to isolate the different backups so that if you lose one, there’s no way the culprit – be it malware, intentional sabotage, or even a house fire – can go on to affect the other backups. (The Balance)

Data Recovery

If your backups do fail, then you’re going to be enlisting the help of a data recovery service. These technicians use software to recover data that has been lost for one reason or another, whether a hard drive became corrupted, suddenly stopped working, or was physically destroyed. There are numerous ways in which data can suddenly become inaccessible and data recovery services specialize in retrieving data that is thought to be lost. For the most part, data recovery usually involves storage media, such as hard drives, flash drives, and solid-state drives. (Techopedia)

Data recovery is not a win/loss game. Sometimes the technicians will be able to recover all of your lost data and other times they won’t be able to salvage anything, but just as often they’ll be able to rescue a portion of it. Some data recovery services consider it a win only if they can recover all of the data, while others see success in any recovery whatsoever. There are several variables when it comes to data loss and recovery and how much, if any, of your data will be recovered depends on a wide variety of factors. (Secure Data Recovery)

Regardless of how careful you are, data disasters can and will happen. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do everything in your power to prevent them. There are never any guarantees when it comes to data recovery, so the best option is to prevent the data loss from happening in the first place.