8 Things Every Business Should Know About Data Recovery

Contingencies like natural disastrous might come once in a lifetime but can cause huge damages to lives and properties. However, software and hardware failures are always there to affect your data at any time. Apart from these, human errors like accidental deletion or hard drive partition can lead to data loss issues. Malware or virus activities are also evident for data loss.

Data loss refers to a situation when your data becomes inaccessible, corrupted, or missing from the storage location. It can even affect personal computers, laptops, and devices.

However, the problem can be far more disastrous for businesses. So, if you are into a business, then you must have a proper idea of how to recover your lost data. Studies have reported that small and medium-sized businesses get mostly affected by data loss.

How to Recover Data and Ensure Your Business Continuity?

We have eight different ways that will help you to avoid data loss.

1. Plan a Backup Strategy

A proper backup plan is the first decision that every business owner must take to secure their confidential data. The 3-2-1 business plan has been quite popular among the business group. Moreover, this backup plan asks business owners to create at least three backups. Arrange for two storage drives and store one backup offsite.

So, if you have three backups, then you can restore data if one of them fails. Moreover, routine checks will automate these backup tasks for better efficiency. For example, Calendar will add reminders to various backup related tasks and provide valuable feedback if you want.

2. Develop a Recovery Strategy

In case you have a well-planned recovery strategy, then the workflow won’t be interrupted in an event of data loss. You can neither prevent corruption or accidental deletion of data is stored in traditional hard drives.

Thus, you can easily hire data recovery services or use some software to pull yourself out of this situation. Backup might get obsolete if you do not maintain them from time to time.

3. Backup Schedule

The criticality and affordability of data determine the frequency of backup that you must follow. There is not yet an answer to whether you should create and maintain a regular backup or not. But, since we are talking about business data, you must backup your business database nightly. However, use a reliable data recovery tool in case the data gets lost in between the backup cycle. Otherwise, it might lead to permanent loss or corruption of data.

4. Test and Document Backup

Testing and backups are the two important factors to prevent data loss in any situation. It is not enough to create a data recovery strategy. Hence, you will also need to ensure that it is able to backup your data successfully. So, after creating a backup, save some data to ensure that the system is working correctly. Moreover, these documents will be beneficial for your business if the persons who have created this recovery plan are currently unavailable.

5. Antimalware Virus Protection

Both a standalone system or a device on the organization’s network require antivirus and malware protection. Competitors are always ready to hack your company’s website and access important information. Then, they can use this information for their personal benefit and degrade your business’s goodwill.

So, take previous measures to keep your business away from potential web traps. To do so, you can use tools for monitoring individual data storage systems in your business. This continuous monitoring will enable you to protect storage drives and data corruption.

6. Avoid a Fragmented Drive

A fragmented hard drive will never allow you to recover your data successfully. Unlike a defragmented hard drive, a fragmented hard drive requires more rotations for accessing chunks of data. As a result, it takes more time to perform read or write operations.

Moreover, fragmentation might lead to overheating issues for hard drives. Thus, it can result in permanent failure of the hard drive and deletion of data. At the same time, the disk usage increases and slows down your system while conducting the data recovery process.

To avoid such consequences, you must use the defragment tool of Windows and run the CHKDSK command. Also, make sure to avoid the defragmentation task after encountering a data loss. Otherwise, the defragmentation will overwrite your deleted or lost data and make them irrecoverable permanently.

7. Do Not Use Storage Media or System after Data Loss

Data loss becomes severe because users continue to use their storage devices even after data loss. Hence the lost files are critically damaged before recovery. So, if you still want to use the affected device, then you have to restore the data from a backup or clone the hard drive. But, ensure you consider expert opinions before taking any major step.

8. Data Storage Training

Organize training for the Do’s and Don’ts to ensure the safety of your organizational data. Human error is being observed to be the most common reason for data loss. Thus, you must try to reduce these efforts as much as possible. In short, your employees must have a better understanding and play an active role in preventing data loss.

Finally…

It’s better to take preventive measures before a data loss situation can arise. Therefore, have a systematic backup strategy and recovery planning in place. Make sure that these options are flexible so that you can change them as per your changing business needs.