The first thing you may say when you balk against this idea is probably something along the lines of “we have solid-state drives in our data centers, those things are indestructible”. While they are definitely superior to traditional electromechanical hard drives, solid-state drives are far from indestructible nor are they immune to several of the environmental hazards that can mess up a traditional hard drive severely.
In a second, we will talk about some of the reasons you might need hard drive recovery, but first, understand how important your data really is. The world moves quickly now, and it gets faster every day. Daily backups just aren’t enough, when all is said and done. Sure, they can save the bulk of your data when a disaster happens, but being even a few hours out of date on your business data can be absolutely disastrous in modern times.
Of course, every second that your data is out of date, and accessible or otherwise compromised, you are losing money. You can’t render services, you can’t do business, you can’t even provide customer service to existing customers in an effective way. This, ultimately, is why you should find your hard disk recovery service and ahead of time. Cultivate a relationship with your hard drive recovery service, that way they are ready to get you back up and running the moment something goes wrong.
What can go wrong, you may be wondering? Surely hackers aren’t a big threat they used to be, are they? Well, don’t count them out, given recent hacks that have happened to major game, entertainment and food service providers out there, but they aren’t the biggest threat as far as cybercrime. That honor goes to ransomware, in insidious technology which encrypts all of the data it can find, at which point the cipher is held hostage until crypto currency is paid to an anonymous account.
Instances of this destructive act have spiked in the past few years, and that it is getting harder and harder to recover from without expert help. Fortunately, recovery services have all kinds of techniques to crack encryption like this, and they will eventually get your data back. This is probably the most time-consuming disaster to recover from, but you are guaranteed to get your data back.
Now, cybercrime isn’t the only potential disaster. Hard drives can simply malfunction over time, even solid-state drives, and a host of environmental factors can also be disastrous and destructive. These include fires, floods, electrical storms, human error and even what technology experts commonly call “gremlins”, or errors that have no apparent cause but re-complete and total havoc.
Let’s talk a little bit more about non-hostile catastrophes that can occur, even when some structural or natural disaster doesn’t happen. We talked about the above gremlins, they are a bigger problem than you might realize. Believe it or not, there is a mathematical possibility that some cosmic particle, usually harmless and undetectable to all but the most sensitive instruments, could pass through a connection or circuit board, causing all manner of havoc if a heavy data process is underway when it occurs. This sounds ridiculous, but it actually happens all the time. Fortunately, recovery services can fix this, but it’s an easy way to get caught with your pants down, metaphorically-speaking.
Now, here’s another common scenario where you might need a recovery service. If you have been in business for a long time, you might have backups of data dating back decades, as you want to bring all of this into a modern database. A margin he is good, dating all the way back to day zero, if possible. In some countries, this is actually being required by law where possible for ease of government auditing as a matter of fact. So far, this hasn’t happened in the UK or the United States, but it’s not unforeseeable that it may down the line.
Think back just 10 years, and you are looking back at a time when backups were saved on DVDs, CDs and even still floppy disks. For large amounts of data, backup tapes were still widely used until very recently as well. Sure, you probably have the facilities to read this data back in, but if it has set for a long time undisturbed in some physical archive, there’s a good chance that you won’t be able to without the help of a recovery service.
Tapes and floppy disks use magnetic surfaces to store their data, and over time, this magnetic field can and will degrade. Large amounts of electromagnetic energy, temperature and humidity can expedite this process quite nastily as well. CDs and DVDs will eventually begin to decay to, undergoing chemical changes from UV and temperature, this phenomenon commonly being called bit rot.
There is also the chance of simple human error. If you have older people in your company that aren’t entirely familiar with modern systems, but they either intentionally or unintentionally have considerable access levels within your systems and your software, they could accidentally clicked the wrong button to reformat a hard drive, erase files, convert them to an unusable format, the sky is the limit. This sort of thing actually happens all the time, human error famously cause Facebook to temporarily disappear from the Internet just a couple weeks ago.
Has all of this talk of the various dangers to your data made you feel a little afraid? Good, that was actually the point. While instilling fear is something that we generally don’t like to do, you should fear for your data, now and forever. The smart thing to do? Have a data recovery service on hand.
If you have a recovery service on hand and ready to go before a disaster happens, you drastically minimize the time your business is without their up-to-date data, potentially saving your business from completely failing a recoverability itself. Most of these services are happy to give you a consultation and talk to you with no initial charge, year to cultivate these relationships themselves, for obvious reasons!