Sunday 12 April 2009

Make sure you back up data correctly












I can't stress how important computer data is worth to us all, especially people like myself who's bread and butter is on a computer. Computers have grown on us all over the years as they have been a means of making certain things in life easier. So saying that it's not hard to realize that losing important computer data can infact ruin a big group of us.

It's overwhelming to think that your data could be lost at anytime. We rely on our computers to store our precious data but these machines are known to fail from time to time. Though computer systems have been improved and have advanced tremendously over the years, but it is still very possible to lose data no matter how good the computer is. They are machines made by man, and men make mistakes, so it's impossible for man to build the perfect computer.

However, there are ways to prevent data loss. You can take steps to preventing losing precious data and the most obvious and easiest way, is to back it up and keep backing it up. Depending on how important your data is will determine how often you should make backups. If it's that important I'd recommend making daily backups, though most will likely only make weekly backups. But it is possible to buy software that can backup data for you, or you could setup a bunch of cheap hard drives in a RAID array.

Some people might backup small bits of data day to day, using floppy disks. But this probably isn't good enough. What you need to be doing is making full backups of your hard drive on a regular basis. Another way to backup data would be to burn files to a DVD/CD or even a dual layer DVD. There are programs that can do this for you such as acronis true image and norton ghost. These programs will make a backup of your entire hard drive and you can either store that backup on another hard drive or you can select another option such as burning the backup to a CD/DVD. The best thing about these programs is that not only do they back up your data but they also backup the operating system. Meaning that if you restore a backup it will actually restore the operating system with all your settings and programs. These programs aren't free but they are well worth the investment if you're worried about data loss.

So backing up your data could be for personal reasons or it could be for business, either way you can't go wrong with backing it up. Make sure you backup data correctly too as even this can go pear shaped. There's nothing more frustrating than a backup that wasn't made properly and then not realizing this until after data has corrupted and then you get your backup, try to restore but the backup is corrupt also. A very bad situtation to be in and trust me, i should know I've been there...

Thursday 9 April 2009

Data recovery in a nutshell


Everyone that owns a computer will have at least once in their computer life encountered hard drive failure. The causes of it can vary, sometimes it's human error other times it could be a hardware fault, like a corrupted hard drive. Then there are web nasties like Trojans/viruses along with a multitude of factors that can be involved in this nightmarish scenario. Because of this common problem that everyone falls into, data recovery has been for years a very valuable need.

Virtually every type of hard disk can be restored. If the hard disk is making a scratching or ticking noise, it's possible to use specialized software for data recovery. In some cases the aperture arm within the hard disk can wear and cease to operate properly, or the hard disk platter/s become damaged thus corrupting the information contained within them. Recovering the data yourself is not always successful. In which case you may have to send your hard drive off to have it repaired or have the data recovered by a specialist company.

Recovering your data is always an option with cheap hard drives that 2GB to anything over 300GB. In most circumstances, regardless of the size of the hard drive, data should be recoverable. One great feature of data recovery is that you are able to recover data from the operating system's recycling bin. You can also recover a whole partition and even information that seems to be completely lost is quite recoverable also. You might think that a certain piece of data is lost indefinitely but there are technicians out there that can retrieve that data for you.

Whatever operating system you are running, the data can be recovered, whether it be windows, mac or linux. Some of you who are on RAID setups are good except those on RAID 0. The problem with RAID 0 is it only stripes the data for faster read/write but there is no mirroring or data backup. So if one drive fails the whole RAID dies with it. Just a little note for those using RAID 0.

Data recovery is a very useful tool and there are many different types and brands of data recovery software available on the market. And if DIY data recovery fails for you, there is always help at hand with a professional data recovery service. So 99.9% of the time that you ever lose any of your valuable data, you can rest assured that there is always a way to retrieve that lost data back and restore it.