There are on balance, only two types of hard drive: one that has failed, and one that will.
How do you personally react to that statement? Are you feeling slightly smug that your hard drive hasn’t let you down, and your investment in IT was worth every penny? Or perhaps, your shoe is on the other foot, and you are relieved that, although your hard drive has already been replaced, your computer is now prepped to survive another 3 or 4 years before it finally croaks.
No matter what your reaction is to the opening statement, your actions should be the same: make sure that have a foolproof backup procedure in place for all of your documents. Forums are awash with people despairing as to what the solution could be to restore their documents and avoid them permanently disappearing out of sight.
The above scenario involves only one computer, can you imagine the impact of a loss of data to a business? Research by the University of Texas on the effects of catastrophic data loss to a business, found that only 6% of companies survive; to avoid falling into the 94%, you need to understand how your company may lose data and what you can do to protect against it.
Machines and hardware fail – 96% of all business workstations are not backed up
While the majority of modern systems are fairly resilient, your company computers are not 100% immune to failure. You need to minimize the risk of potential hardware failures having a negative effect on the business by ensuring backup procedures and processes are followed, and work correctly. By having a successful backup procedure, you can easily restore your files and documents to an error-free state – you need to regularly test that your backups meet the ever-moving business requirements, so that they can provide a contemporaneous picture of your business in the event of an emergency.
Human error and accidental deletion – 25% of PC users lose data every year
Nothing can quite bring you a sense of nausea than when you have just ordered your computer to perform a task, and then realizing on the final click that you shouldn’t have. Or maybe, you are in the middle of transferring e-mails between two servers by moving the key folders directly between the two locations, and before you know it, Outlook has crashed before all the data made it to the destination folder. While there are plenty of solutions offered online, would you really trust your documents to be restored on the advice of a stranger on the internet? In this situation, you need professionals who will provide you with an emergency solution; a company like Secure Data Recovery will remotely access your PC to save irreplaceable data.
You need to ensure that staff keep their PCs updated with regards to the firewalls, anti-spyware and anti-virus software. By developing procedures to back up your data, and rolling them out so that they become a natural part of the end of day procedure across the business, you are strengthening your disaster recovery plan; and should the worst-case scenario happen? You are ready!
