At Data Recovery Specialists, we’re a business – but we’d rather not see avoidable data loss mishaps.
With the sheer amount of data we store – the estimate in 2020 was 64 zettabytes, with this unit equalling one billion terabytes. We store everything; our photos, our videos, our movies, our memories. Data loss is never a nice situation, and while companies such as Data Recovery Specialists exist to help you in your time of need, avoiding data recovery is preferable.
The first and most important thing you can do – and we bang on about in this in most of our articles – is to regularly back up your data. We can’t stress enough how important it is to keep a secondary copy of your data, so if your primary copy is lost or compromised, data recovery will be easy.
The most complete form of a data backup is known as a full backup, and in the event of a data loss incident, data recovery will be simple – you simply restore from the backup. For businesses this may result in some downtime, but it’s better than having to spend days getting your data back professionally from a data recovery company. One major downside to a full backup is the amount of space and time it will take, particularly if you’re a business. But again, this may be a price worth paying to avoid potentially costly data recovery.
Another type of backup is the incremental backup, which many businesses rely on to save time. When an incremental backup is performed, only data that has been created since the last backup is saved. This is a faster, more efficient way of backing up your data. However, when faced with a data recovery incident, the incremental backup will need to be combined with the last full backup and other incremental backups, increasing restoration time.
As well as having one copy of your data, you should consider having a second stored off-site. This prevents your data from being stolen, but also protects it from natural disaster. Our data recovery team have worked on many a water damaged hard drive!
We’ve written a lot about the proliferation of ransomware in recent years, so make sure you have a decent, up-to-date antivirus installed. It’s also worth becoming learned in best practices to avoid becoming the victim of a ransomware attack that could compromise your data – phishing links in emails are common culprits.
Finally, if you’ve accidentally deleted a file or folder, there’s a chance that data recovery software may be able to help.