Backup and disaster recovery

How important is the information on your computer? How much time and money will you lose if your computer crashes? Just like your car, home appliance or television, computers break. A recent study at a Carnegie Mellon University found that hard drive failure rate is as high as 13% per year on some systems (Schroeder & Gibson, 2007). Although computer failure is inevitable, data loss can be easily prevented. We have designed and implemented backup systems and disaster recovery plans for organizations with time sensitive data, including daily or weekly on-side and off-site backup.

There are several ways to minimize data loss:

1. Setting up your hard drives in RAID configuration. If you configure your hard drives in RAID 1 configurations, identical data is written to multiple disks. Having two disks containing the same data, will minimize chances of data loos in case the hard drive fails. For example, if there is a 1% chance of hard drive to fail, there is 0.01% chance for both hard drives failing at the same time. In the case one of the hard drives fails, you can continue using the system with one working hard drive and once you replace the damaged hard drive, it will be reconfigured automatically and data will be automatically mirrored.
2. Backing up your information. There are several backup utilities exist on the market offered by Microsoft, Norton, Acronis and many more. There are several levels of backup that can be implemented:
   1. An extra Hard Drive can be installed on your computer to backup your data on a daily or weekly basis.
   2. If you need to backup several computers in your office, you might consider getting a Network-attached Storage (NAS) device or a separate computer where the data from all other computers can be backed-up through the network connection.
   3. You might consider off-site backup in addition to your regular backup. The main reason for the off-site backup is to preserve your data in case of a flood, fire or theft, because in such cases data contained on a local backup device will get destroyed as well.

If you have you backup system in place, and your computer crashes, the only data which will be lost is between last backup and the minute your computer crashed. And here is another thing backup can help you with. How many times you delete a file and need to recover it? Having a backup system in place, with daily backups, you can find this file from a week ago and restore to your current system.

Data loss is not the only problem company can face. If your server crashes and need to be replaced, even if you are not worried about data lost, how much time and money will your company lose by the time this server is fixed and up on line again?

What do you do if your computer has crashed and you do not have a backup? Although it is easier and less expensive to prevent data loss, in such situation, data recovery is the only option.

When hard drive fails, in most cases, the data on the disk has not been completely destroyed. Although both consumer and professional applications are available on the market, valuable data should only be recovered by professionals. Many non-professional recovery attempts (i.e. by using "chkdsk") may result in overwriting the data and permanently destroying it. Our company can provide professional data recovery service. We have been able to recover most hard drives and bring system back to normal within days.