Data recovery comes into the picture when data is lost. Unfortunately, data loss is too common an occurrence to be ignored. Data can get lost owing to factors beyond your control, or from simple human errors. Let us look at these factors to get a feel for the danger most organizations face.

The digital data stored in computers can get damaged or lost owing to:

• Disk drive malfunction as when the read/write head touches the platter (instead of floating a microscopic distance away)
• System crashes or electrical disturbances causing the data to get corrupted and unreadable
• Accidental deletion of data by operators or administrators, or formatting of media that contains needed data
• Malicious damage to data caused by persons with a grievance against the company
• Virus and hacker attacks leading to loss of or damage to data
• Misplaced or stolen storage media containing valuable data
• Physical disasters like fire, flood and earthquake

As you will begin to realize, data damage and loss can occur in all offices.

Impact of Data Loss

Modern business organizations work with documents and information. The documents make the work flow and if they are lost, day-to-day work can be affected seriously. Loss of documents can also mean that you will be unable to enforce your claims in a court of law.

Decision making depends on availability of relevant information. Decision makers look at what happened in the past – the trends and patterns – and project these into the future to decide the best course of action. If information is missing or incomplete because of data loss, the quality of business decisions deteriorates.

Data loss thus has very serious business consequences affecting its profitability and cash flows.

How Do You Prevent Data Loss

It is impracticable to eliminate all the data loss factors outlined earlier. What you can do is to ensure that data losses can be recovered from if it does occur. You do this through:

• Implementing systematic data backup procedures to ensure that data is either backed up online as it is created, or that they are backed up at the end of every work session
• Checking that the backed up data is adequate to reconstruct the records if it becomes necessary. Backups can prove unreliable if done incompletely or without adequate care
• Storing the backup elsewhere, such as on a Web server, so that natural disasters like a fire does not cause their destruction
• Arranging for stable and backup power supply. A stable supply can minimize data losses caused by electrical disturbances, while backup supply can take over if the main supply fails.
• Keeping antivirus and other harmful software out by installing security software
• Keeping hackers out with the help of firewall software
• Training computer operators and administrators to use safe operating practices

What to Do if Data Loss Occurs

Data loss can be aggravated if you continue to work after a problem has occurred. The following precautions can help in making sure that the damage is minimized.

• Stop working when you notice a problem, such as unusual noises from the disk drive
• Do not try to repair any damage unless you are technically proficient in data recovery
• Develop a plan of action to recover the data:
  • Remove damaged media and restore backed up data to new media
  • If the back up is not up-to-date or otherwise unsatisfactory, consider how to recover data from the damaged media
  • If you are not fully confident about your technical expertise, seek the help of a professional data recovery specialist
  • If you do attempt data recovery yourself, first create a mirror image of the damaged media so that it can be entrusted to specialists in case your recovery attempts fail
• Data recovery professionals have dedicated and specialized facilities, such as clean rooms to maximize the possibility of recovering data from damaged disks. Seeking their help could be the best course open to you unless the data damage is insignificant

Data recovery plans must be incorporated into your document management system without fail.