Ways to Prevent Data Loss

There’s nothing more disheartening than losing the important files or documents that you have invested so much time creating. To safeguard important business functions, managers should look into all strategies to avoiding the disasters that can fall upon their data. Thus, we are giving you these essential tips to avoid the terrible experience of data loss.

Prevention is better than Cure

Firstly, the computer environment needs to be clean, dry, safe, dust-free and organized to the extent that equipment cannot be shaken or impaired. Bigger companies and organizations must have consistent power supplies to save data during power failures while small institutions can use power surge suppressors.

The majority of companies preserve their backed-up data from areas in a secure location, but often times they disregard the basic action of confirming that the appropriate data is safely kept on reliable tapes. It is not sufficient to view data on the tape – imagine if these are older files that aren’t being over-written by latest information?

Viruses have posed a more crucial risk to data and they can appear from unforeseen sources. Almost any data entering the network needs to undergo scanning, and the entire system should be scanned consistently. The scanning application itself should be updated no less than four times per year. Any hard drive that’s been clearly destroyed or subjected to heat, humidity or smoke shouldn’t be used. Storage devices that seem “funny” must be de-activated quickly to counteract total damage of data.

Never save your files on a single drive as your operating system

While most word processors will save your documents in the My Documents folder, this is actually the worst location for them. Be it a computer virus or software malfunction, virtually all computer troubles impact the operating system, and quite often the only option is to reformat the drive and re-install the operating system. In this situation, everything on the drive will be lost.

Setting up an additional hard-drive in your computer system is a reasonably inexpensive solution to handle this matter. An extra internal hard-drive won’t be impaired if the operating system is damaged, and it can also be set up on another computer if you want to purchase a brand new one; further, you will be amazed at how simple they are to install.
In case you are suspicious about setting up a second internal hard drive, a very good alternative is to purchase an external hard-drive. An external drive can be mounted on any computer whenever you want by simply connecting it into a USB or Firewire port.

Back up your files consistently, irrespective of where they’re saved

Just keeping your data files in a distinct location than your operating-system is not enough; you have to produce frequent backups of your files, and let’s be honest, even your back up is susceptible to failure: CDs get nicked, hard drives crack, and other similar situations. However, the present electronic market offers us a variety of portable external drives that perfectly secures your data and other files. Make some smart research about the latest external solutions and get to know the brands Iomega, Seagate, Western Digital external hard drive.

It’s also wise to increase the chances of you having the ability to recover a file by using a second back up of it; in the event the data is really essential, you could even choose to consider saving a backup in a fire resistant vault. Ideas like these can keep your important documents longer and safer.

Watch out for email attachments

Even if you are certain they don’t have viruses, email attachments could potentially cause you to lose data. Consider this: when you obtain a document with similar name as one on your drive, and your email application is set to save attachments in the same position, you take the possibility of overwriting the document that’s currently there. This usually occurs when you’re working together on a document and mail it through email.

So ensure that you set your email program to save attachments in a distinctive location, or, excluding that, you should think carefully prior to saving an email attachment on your hard disk.

Preserve hardcopies of your documents

While it won’t keep you from needing to type and structure your document again, creating a hardcopy will at least make certain you hold the contents of the file — and that’s better than having practically nothing!