As per Murphy’s Law, if something has to go wrong, it will, and that, too, at the most inopportune moment. If we were to know when this unfortunate moment would arrive, we could all sit back and relax with our cups of coffee and challenge the next psychic that came our way.

Sadly, the moment of triumph has not arrived in this technological age yet. We never know when the disaster would strike and the only way to insure ourselves from the misfortune is to constantly keep backing up our data. Backup systems provide immediate relief to your business and ensure its continuity in times of crisis. Most companies rely on the IT professionals to retrieve their data when the data is lost. The companies should avoid this typical error. Adequate training should be provided to the employees to learn not only the backup procedures, but also the methods of retrieval. Employees will always learn better from their own mistakes. Your valuable data can be very vulnerable to spyware and viruses. These can creep into the company’s system through any software you might download. Once the virus becomes active, it can create havoc inside the data system and you could either lose your data or end up with data that is full of errors. Only an effective backup system along with reliable virus detection software can help you recover your data in such circumstances. Now that we realise the importance of backup systems, how does one go about selecting an appropriate backup media? How does a consumer choose amongst the plethora of options available? We have some guidelines you can use that will help you in your selection.

Guidelines for Selecting the Optimal Data Backup Media

Since the users of data backup media have different needs, the choice of backup media for these users will differ accordingly. The backup media market has many options to choose from and we will evaluate the effectiveness of each option with respect to the consumer market.

CDs, DVDs, Pen Drives: This option is most suitable for home and home office users. CDs can hold approximately 800 MB of data whereas DVDs can hold up to 5 GB. DVDs and CDs are somehow losing their charm because of the time that is required to back up the data using these options. Storage space required for a large number of CDs/DVDs could be considerable and hence the task of backing up could become cumbersome. Pen drives with good storage capacity are a good option for home and home office users. It is portable, data storage is fast, and its storage is easy. The disadvantage of a pen drive is that it will not be able to back up your entire system due to the compact nature of its size. Analysing these three options from a cost perspective, CDs and DVDs are much cheaper alternatives than pen drives if you already have a CD or DVD burner installed on your computer.

Portable Hard Disk: Opting for a portable hard disk is a very good option for home and home office users, and the companies. The hard drives do not cost a lot these days and the storage capacity is an impressive 120 GB. Since the hard drives are portable, you can use it at your office location or an external location. Portable hard disks are gaining a lot of popularity because of their ease of use and reliability.

Tape Drives: These can be used by larger companies as well as home and home office users. The main advantage of a tape drive is that it is able to store several GB of data. However, tape drives are an expensive alternative as compared to DVDs considering that you will have to keep purchasing costly tape cartridges. Tape backup is getting extremely unpopular in today’s business world where time is of essence. One of the major reasons for this unpopularity is the fact that it takes a lot of time to retrieve the data from a tape drive. In addition, the performance of a tape backup has generally not recorded 100% data retrieval, which might be due to the fragile nature of its components. It is also very hard to back up remote users data using this technology and, worst still, you may still have errors in your data when the data is restored. The tape technology can still be used for long term archival provided it is in stored in a proper storage system. Disk storage would be a better option than tape if your business objective of a backup option were “back on track in no time”. A tape stores the data in a linear manner. Therefore, you will have to start looking for the data from the beginning to actually find what you’re looking for. However, a disk stores the data in a mirror-like manner, reflects every aspect of your system instantly and is, therefore, a faster data retrieval method.



Thanks to James Walsh for contributing this article to our Data Recovery blog:

Hard Disk Recovery Services

The data loss has taken place- what next? Determining the requirement to retrieve the lost data could be a challenging one. There are lots of things to take into the consideration when deciding if the data recovery is essential.

Backup

Every computer user knows the significance of a proper backup system, thus your first step towards data recovery is to find out if you have complete backup. Several times lost data could be restored from backup and data recovery could be prevented.

Unluckily, due to lack of time or extra faith on computers, most of the users do not create proper backup of their data and fall in disastrous situations when data loss happens. Sometimes the backup may also lost, if it was created on the same hard drive.

Re-Creation

Another significant option to decide is if your data could or should be re-created. While considering this option, two items should be taken into account which includes type and amount of data:

Type of data

Different types of data might have different apparent value. Retrieving a customer’s database is more important than retrieving a file which contains possible nick names of your pet dog. Is the lost data extremely important for running your business operations?

It would be nearly not potential to recreate a number of records, transactions, database tables and so forth. It could take several months to complete, which can not be accepted by any business organization. Some types of data like digital photo and videos could not be recreated.

Amount of data

Understanding the amount of the lost data could help you in finding out how much resources and time will be needed for recreation of data. The more data is lost, the more resources and time is need for recreating.

After considering all these factors, the only thing left is data recovery. In majority of data loss situations, which cause by the logical damages,  data recovery is potential using Do It Yourself data recovery software. You can have quick and efficient data recovery using these applications.

To have absolute, ensured and successful data recovery, it is required to use a powerful and advanced data recovery tool. Stellar Information Systems Ltd provides such  data recovery software for all computer operating system to cure all possible logical data loss posers.

All these data recovery software are highly developed and influential. They perform in-depth scan of entire hard drive and extract as much data as possible. To know more about these data recovery utilities, download free demo versions from Stellar’s website.



Thanks to shally spears for contributing this article to our Data Recovery blog:

Hard Disk File Recovery

Can you answer Silly Shelu’s question about Data Recovery?:

When we use the data backup utility, does the system create an exact copy of the selected data in which case the backed up volume would be as bigger as the selected data ?

Please explain..

Emergency Data Recovery