Creating a Complete Data Protection and Restoration Strategy

Creating a Complete Data Protection and Restoration Strategy

Backing up your data is the best way to prevent losing it. This method comes into play when you’ve suffered a system failure or hardware corruption. Your IT folks simply—or not so simply, depending on the method you used for backup—restore your data from the backed up files.

No matter what you do, data backup is the most essential part of a data protection plan. But is there something you can do to potentially prevent you from losing your data at all?

There are other steps you can take, in concert with data backup, to help protect your data. The best data protection strategy is to create a holistic plan that incorporates both prevention and restoration.

With data backup as the cornerstone of your plan, there are about a half a dozen other actions you can incorporate across the board at your company.

* Run an anti-virus program to prevent and eliminate viruses that could take advantage of security flaws and compromise your data.
* Use power surge protectors everywhere to prevent power surges from causing hard-drive failure and potentially damaging your data.
* Always quit your programs and shut down your computer properly to eliminate the risk of losing any unsaved data. Quitting programs and shutting down properly allows the system to save vital data before exiting a program.
* You should neither disassemble your hard drive nor shake nor remove the covers on hard drives or tapes, because data will likely become unrecoverable once you have tried to perform a task with which you are not familiar.
* Checking the health of your computer with diagnostics programs is a good idea, allowing such programs to repair any issues they find can make it more difficult to recover data if you lose it.
* Assure your computers and laptops are in safe locations where they won’t be knocked over, stepped on, sat on, dropped or spilled on.
* Avoid moving your computer, especially when it’s in operation.

Above all, never attempt any operation such as installations or repairs with which you have no experience. Leave the diagnostics to a data recovery specialist who has experience with all types of hard drives and knows how to perform successful data recovery.