Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Planning For Data Loss

By Owen Jones


If you make your money by using a computer, you ought to protect yourself against any computer disasters. If you were a taxi driver, you would take out car and public liability insurance. If you were an employer, you might take out plant and equipment insurance. If you were a landlord you would take out property insurance and loss of earnings insurance.

But what do you do if you work on line? Well, when you work with computers, data is your most valuable resource, but you cannot insure against losing it because you cannot prove that you ever had it. So, what can you do? The answer is that you need to have dependable backups and a number of of them.

The problem is that computers do not really break down very often so we become lulled into the false feeling of security that we can make backups tomorrow instead of right now. However, the longer that you work with IT, the more you comprehend that there are no warning signs when you are about to lose all your data, which may be your entire earnings stream.

For instance, say you create web sites for a living and update them frequently so that the search engines find them interesting. What would occur if your hard drive crashed or if they were destroyed by a virus? You might say that you would download them from your Internet host and begin again, but that is not possible, because most HTML editors will not decompile a completed website.

That would mean that you could never refresh those web sites again, so they would become less and less interesting to the search engines, so your ranking would fall and your income would plummet. And why? Because you failed to insure your business by taking adequate backups. You did not make provision for data recovery in the event of data loss.

However, no matter how often you backup your data on physical media, you will always be facing a danger because anything physical, any device is prone to failure and deterioration. CD's do not last as long as we were promised. I have lost loads of work that I reckoned was safe on CD's and hard drives are apt to fail with no notice at all.

Even if you do overcome these issues of storage, what occurs if there is a fire or a thief really steals all your disks and computers? Your hardware would be insured but your livelihood, your data would be gone forever. All that hard effort. Your source of earnings. Gone. Forever.

There is a different alternative and that is not to hold your data on your computer, in your office or anywhere within a thousand miles of yourself. This is called cloud storage or cloud data storage. Microsoft calls it Sky Drive and offers 25 GB of free, password-protected, storage available from anywhere in the world. This kind of storage is the ultimate in secure storage providing the best value recovery planning for computer data.




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