Do you ever wondered if what you know about data recovery is accurate? Consider the following paragraphs and compare what you know to the latest info on data recovery.
Sooner or later your company could become the victim of a natural disaster, or something much more common, like a lightning storm or downed power lines.
Just because your company may be a small business doesn’t mean it’s immune to data disasters. If a small business does not have a good and tested disaster recovery plan in place when disaster hits, they may never fully recuperate, and it may even cause them to go out of business. Sometimes even a data recovery service is unable to help.
The four most common reasons for data loss are:
-Deletion. You deleted the file by accidentally during a disk cleanup, or because you thought it was no longer required. However, the data will still exist until the space it occupied on the disk is used by another file.
- File system corruption. The disk suddenly appears empty, or the file and folder names appear gibberish. The files probably still exist, but the pointers to them have been lost or corrupted, and the OS cannot find them.
-Physical damage or hardware failure. You receive error messages when you try to read the disk, or it will not be recognized by the computer at all. The data is still likely to be present on the disk itself, but the drive is unable to access it.
Following are some questions that should be answered in order to give you some idea of what you need to do to that will help you if you do have a data disaster situation.
Do you know where your company’s most important data files are located?
Are these files being backed up and by what means?
How often do you run these data backups and are they verified and tested?
Do you have automated controls that correctly and on a consistent basis do the backups?
Do your data backup tapes go off-site and how often?
Do you have some kind of security against tampering or theft of your data backups?
Do you keep your servers, routers, hubs, and phone system controllers in locked areas to keep them more secure?
Does just anyone had access to your servers and your other technology assets, or do you limit access to at least two, but no more than four people?
Do you run a locally secure operating system, such as Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, Microsoft Windows XP, or Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4,on the company’s desktop PCs and notebooks?
Do you have any confidential data stored locally on any desktop PCs or notebooks? Are any of these systems running an inherently in-secure operating system, such as Microsoft Windows 9x or Microsoft Windows Me?
Do you prevent unauthorized boot-ups or tampering with BIOS configuration settings by using power-on passwords?
On your desktop PCs and notebooks, how are main updates, service packs and releases kept current?
Booting issues, virus attacks, or corrupted file systems are very much present in any exchange or mail servers and can cause many of your archived email messages to apparently disappear. Companies which rely heavily on email communication and do not have backups might find this a pervading problem. But data recovery designed specifically for email recovery can fix this problem.
The bottom line is that you can’t plan when a data disaster may strike, but taking a few steps beforehand may help with your company’s survival in the days and weeks following a disaster.
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