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Frighteningly a very high percentage of business around the world are only a very short step away from total data loss even though they believe they are all ok. A principal culprit here is un-validated tape back ups. Simply put many companies go through a tape backup procedure but in the event of a problem it is only then that they realise the company back up has failed

Through some basic steps, businesses can better protect themselves against catastrophic data loss, these steps include:

• · Why do I need a Disaster Recovery Plan (DR) plan?
• · Defining and planning
• · Implementation
• · Testing

Fire, flood, human error, hardware failure and malicious acts can all cause a small business to at best suffer financial losses, at worst and is far too often the case, shut down for good, every business is susceptible to some king of outage, the need to plan for a disaster is real and needs to be carried out.

One of the most important aspects of a disaster recovery program is to ascertain what are the critical elements of your business. This will vary from business to business so for some it could be to ensure that data subject to long term availability due to legislation is always protected and for others it could be that the value of the business is held in the company CRM database. Whatever the case make sure your DR plan encompasses your most valuable assets at the very least.

Your plan should enable you to bring your business back online as rapidly as possible. Down time is very costly and without putting to fine a point on it the more employees you have the worse a few hours of loss production will be when you take into account the economies of scale.

Remote data backup is a useful tool to have in your disaster recovery portfolio. Many companies will have data and tape back up data stored on company premises. In the event of a major catastrophe such as a fire all company data could be lost. Utilising offsite remote data backup ensure that data is still safe and could even be accessed from another location if required.

Every company will have different requirements so it is always worthwhile to have internal discussions to ascertain each departments principal requirements. Once this is done requirements can be broken down into manageable portions and sections to ensure nothing critical is missed from the plan or overlooked during your internal assessments.

And last but not least test test test! Sadly numerous stories abound of companies that have set up a DR plan of sorts then simply assumed it would work. You need to ensure your plan is robust and tested on a regular basis to ensure key personnel are practiced in its implementation.

Disaster recovery planning, data recovery service and online data backup protocols should be in place for every business that has critical business data and systems. Don’t wait until it is to late and disaster has already struck.

Removing data from a hard drive, permanently, is something that sounds an awful lot simpler than it proves to be in reality. As we all know deleting a file does not remove the file or its content from the hard drive permanently, data recovery companies can normally aid in the recovery of such files, no doubt other less scrupulous individuals are equally capable of such recovery feats.

So if it is so hard to remove private data from an old hard drive what exactly should you be doing to ensure your data has no risk of getting into the wrong hands?

To put it simply there is no safe and easy way of ensuring that data is permantly eradicated from a hard disk or any other form of storage medium in reality. That doesn’t mean however that it can’t be done.

Data can only be considered completely erased when it has been overwritten several times, each time using a different method. The level of overwriting usually considered to guarantee that data has been successfully erased is a seven pass overwriting method using software or manual processes that adhere to the DoD 5220.22-M standard for data erasure.

There is software available that can help in the task but many people prefer to leave data elimination to professional services as they will at least understand the exact processes that need to be followed to ensure complete elimination of any data and the chance of it falling into the wrong hands.

There are also more permanent methods of data destruction, few data recovery companies can retrieve data from a hard drive where the disk’s platters have been physically destroyed.

If you wish to attempt this yourself, it is important to note that the platters within the device should be completely destroyed, this means bending, scratching, smashing, shattering or whatever else seems reasonable to completely annihilate the hard disk platter.

There will always be those that are less educated in the filed of data recovery that will have you believe that simply formatting your drive or even conducting a low level format will do the trick. Sadly this is simply not the case. Another common myth is that reinstalling the operating system will suffice but that will remain the myth that it is.

Not all data will needs to be totally destroyed using the above methods and if you are happy that none of your data is personal or sensitive (both business or personal) then simply dispose of it in an enviromentally responsibly way, but if you are at all unsure don’t take the risk.

Your local data recovery company will be able to advise you on safe hard drive data disposal methods and will probably have a local service. raid data recovery and data disposal should always be left to professional operators who are happy to certify their work.

When money is tight often we are all tempted to do those little repairs that we would other wise get professional help to do and data recovery is no exception. Quite often data recovery are presented with hard drives that have been opened in an unsafe environment and also drive that have sustained further data loss through incorrect use of DIY recovery software.

In most cases this software will be a hard drive recovery programme for a hard disk drive that has suffered from some form of logical table corruption and will not assist with

1. Mechanically failed devices
2. Degraded hard Disk Drives
3. Devices with electronic failures

This software will of course not be able to help and if the drive is degraded or suffering from a mechanical failure attempting to run this software will in most cases cause further damage to hard disk drives, potentially making the disk unrecoverable.

Downloadable recovery software often seems like a good buy and can be quite reasonably priced but unfortunately it will not be able to help with as many hard disk problems and that is an important point to note. If you get it wrong you could lose your files forever!

There are of course a lot of IT experts around of course and you may even have some in your own business, but do they really know what they are doing when it comes to the serious issue of data recovery? You would think that your onsite IT support would be data aware bit this is quite often simply not the case.

In a typical case a drive was initially presented for diagnosis and duly diagnosed with a blown PCB - the drive seemed completely dead and would not spin at all. As an additional test a new PCB was placed on the board so that the response of the heads could be tested. The result of this test was that the heads appeared to have been “blown” by a power surge through the drive.

Upon further discussion, with the client, it transpired that the IT dept had decided to remove the HDD from the laptop and as it was an IDE device mount it as an external storage device by using an IDE connector. Unfortunately they plugged the HDD to the connector “upside down” meaning that crucially the drive received a huge power spike through it when the connector was hooked up to a PC.

It may well have been in this particular scenario that the actual problem could have been no more a few bad sectors on the disk, however due to a certain level of incompetence within this department what originally was more than likely a simple job for a data professional turned into a much more costly full drive rebuild.

Naturally the client is somewhat annoyed that his data, whilst probably still recoverable, is likely to cost much more and take longer in the recovery process.

Unfortunately most Data Recovery Companies will probably have their own tales of customer mishap or IT Technicians making their job more difficult through there well intentioned but often misinformed knowledge of hard disk drive technology.

So the moral of this is that whilst many people will look for a quick and cheap fix for their hard drive recovery problems, they really are best leaving it to the experts.