Thursday, June 16, 2011

Planning For Computer Data Recovery

By Owen Jones


If you make your livelihood by using a computer, you ought to protect yourself against any computer disasters. If you were a taxi driver, you would take out car and public liability insurance. If you were an employer, you may take out plant and tools insurance. If you were a landlord you would take out property insurance and loss of income insurance.

But what do you do if you work on line? Well, if you work with computers, data is your most valuable resource, but you cannot insure against losing it because you cannot prove that you ever had it. So, what can you do? The solution is that you need to have reliable backups and several of them.

The problem is that computers do not often break down so we become lulled into the false feeling of security that we can make backups tomorrow instead of right now. However, the longer that you work with IT, the more you realize that there are no warning signs when you are about to lose all your data, which may be your whole income stream.

For instance, say you make websites for a living and update them frequently so that the search engines find them interesting. What would occur if your hard drive crashed or if they were destroyed by a virus? You might say that you would download them from your Net host and begin again, but that is not feasible, because most HTML editors will not decompile a completed website.

That would mean that you could never update those web sites again, so they would become less and less appealing to the search engines, so your ranking would fall and your income would plummet. And why? Because you failed to insure your business by taking sufficient backups. You failed to make provision for data recovery in the event of data loss.

However, no matter how frequently you backup your data on physical media, you will always be running a danger because anything physical, any item is liable to failure and deterioration. CD's do not last as long as we were promised. I have lost loads of data that I thought was secure on CD's and hard drives are apt to fail with no notice at all.

Even if you do conquer these problems of storage, what occurs if there is a fire or a thief really steals all your disks and computers? Your hardware would be insured but your source of revenue, your data would be gone forever. All that hard work. Your source of income. Gone. Forever.

There is another alternative and that is not to store your data on your computer, in your office or anywhere within a thousand miles of yourself. This is called cloud storage or cloud data storage. Microsoft calls it Sky Drive and offers 25 GB of free, password-protected, storage available from anywhere in the world. This kind of storage is the ultimate in safe storage offering the best value recovery planning for computer data.




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