Backing Up Your Data: Ignore It At Your Peril   by Andrew James

No one wants data loss, but of all the internet wired people I know, I have yet to meet one who has not, at some point, lost important data. This is inevitable, and has nothing to do with the electronic age in particular. Think about it. Haven't you ever lost a notebook for school, or perhaps a paper that you had to turn in? No matter what form our data takes, we will have to face the possibility of losing it. Fortunately computers, unlike other mediums, provide us with data recovery utilities to cope with these disasters.

The best data recovery utility is one which prevents data loss before it happens by providing a backup copy. Really, any kind of file backup system can be considered a data recovery utility. There are many different forms of backup, which vary in complexity, reliability, physical location, and expense. The simplest data recovery utility is making a physical backup of important files. This can be done with a flash drive, which can then be carried with you, or put in a safe place. This has the advantage of portability, but isn't really all that reliable of a data recovery utility.

A better idea is to backup on a physical hard drive. There are data recovery utilities called raid systems, which will automatically create an identical copy of your hard drive as you go along. This is great, because if one hard drive fails, you will still have all of your files on the other hard drive. Another kind of data recovery utility is an off-site backup. This means that your computer logs into a server and uploads encrypted copies of its data on a nightly basis. The data is secured and protected on that remote system. This has the advantage that if something were to happen to your building - say a fire, or an earthquake or other natural disaster, there would still be a perfect copy of your data existing elsewhere.

Of course, once you physically lose your data, you can still find a data recovery utility to use, but your chances of success are much lower. There is data recovery utility software which will search a damaged hard drive, or the fragments of an accidentally erased file, and will sometimes, at least partially, be able to recover what you have lost. Still, this kind of data recovery utility only has a moderate success rate at best, so you would do better to take adequate precaution to not lose your data in the first place.

About the Author

Mr James has owned The Cartridge Specialists (Melbourne) since 2004 selling ink, toner, fax rolls etc & regularly writes articles about his industry