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During Hurricane Ivan, a bank headquartered in Pensacola, Florida – which was hit by the epicenter of the storm – lost data completely. It took weeks before computer data recovery was complete, weeks during which customers did not have access to their cash and often were unable to purchase even the basic necessities.
You probably don’t have a computer system of this magnitude. But when a natural disaster or a manmade disaster strikes, you need to have your data in a recoverable condition as quickly as possible.
Prevention, as always, is the first step. Have a good backup plan for your computer data; one good system is duplicate backups, one physical and one through the Internet. Your physical backup can be kept near the computer for quick restorations when your company suffers loss of data due to power surges or other minor disasters. But your internet backup, located physically somewhere very different, can download your system to a whole new computer, replacing your entire data system within a matter of hours.
If disaster has already struck and you have suffered loss of data, it may still not be the end of the world. Computer data recovery can be accomplished with computers that have been crushed, dropped, flooded, or burned (though burning is a little harder). In this situation, you’ll need to take your computer’s hard drive to a data recovery specialist company. Their professionals can scan the physical data left on your hard drive and, frequently, restore most or even all of the data on the damaged disk to a new computer.
If you do need to go to a data recovery specialist, you should expect to wait a few days for a report on how much data is recoverable and how much it will cost you. And it may not be cheap; data recovery is a complex and time-consuming task.
As you can see, prevention is your best bet, though not the only solution. To protect yourself and your clients, consider setting up a dual backup system. If disaster strikes, it’s your best insurance policy against data loss.
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