Doing business in a digital world can be precarious at times. The dependence on data itself is severe, and at the speed things move, data being even a couple hours out of date can cause all kinds of chaos. This means that everyone is a little bit nervous whenever they hear about things like cybercrime, various technology-affecting disasters and so forth. Of course, a smart business cultivates a relationship with a data recovery service before disasters happen.
The truth of the matter is, there is no way to entirely disaster proof your data. You understandably don’t use cloud services as your primary storage methodology, given the latency, failed to mention the various security policies that would make it awkward due to third-party storage providers. However, putting your servers in a durable, secure location still isn’t enough. Sometimes, hard drive simply fail without warning. Granted, traditional hard drives were far more prone to this, but solid-state technology is not indestructible nor is it infallible.
Have you ever seen a thumb drive or SD card suddenly stop working? Of course you have, and solid-state drives use the same exact technology internally. Severe power surges, extreme heat and water are not friends to solid-state drives anymore than any other electronic components.
Of course, any data recovery UK service out there will tell you that disasters like these aren’t the only problem. Hackers are still a thing, as the news will be quick to point out, though the traditional type of hacking and wild destructive behavior has given way to something far, far more insidious.
While there are many advantages to crypto currency, it has made a particularly evil form of cyber attack possible. Ransomware is a horrible type of cyber attack where in treating software encrypts all of the data it can find, making it impossible to read, open nor modify without a cipher you don’t have. Of course, the villain that deployed the software has the cipher, and they will demand payment to an anonymous account for large amounts of crypto currency in order to receive this cipher.
While there exist tools to manually recover from various forms of ransomware without the use of a data recovery service, these are becoming more and more unfeasible. Developers of ransomware are getting smarter, encryption schema are getting tougher, and the providers of free, open-source recovery tools just can’t keep up.
Thankfully, most data recovery UK services out there have technology that can keep up. They have high-in computers that can brute force the encryption schema if nothing else, though they rarely need to resort to something so primitive. These people are brilliant, capable of recovering data from water-damage drives, electrically-fried drives, dead drives and encryption from cyber attacks like this.
However, natural disasters, structural disasters and criminals aren’t the only things that can cause something to go completely and catastrophically wrong with your data. So, let’s talk about some real problems that existing technology has, things that have been driving scientists to develop practical, indestructible storage media since the beginning of computing. We aren’t there yet, by the way, as the few truly-indestructible storage media out there can only be written to wants, and reading back from them is a slow process.
First, let’s talk about old data that you need to bring in to your modern system to homogenize all of your records. This could be dating back all the way into the 80s or even earlier, being on archaic storage media like backup tapes, floppy disks, CDs and other outdated technologies. You may not even have the equipment to read some of this, but recovery services generally do. However, even if you do have the technology to read this data in, there is a thing called bit rot. In short, these technologies decay over time. The reflective foil of CDs begins to darken and decay, becoming unreadable.
Floppy drives and tapes lose their magnetic cohesion over time, and depending on their environment, this can happen way faster than the maximum lifespan predicted for most of these designs. Even solid-state technology isn’t indestructible, with things like thumb drives and solid-state drives eventually losing their ability to retain data after about a decade of inactivity. Granted, recovery services have made a lot of headway in recovering from even this, but if you have a lot of old data on external drives, it’s time to begin migrating into your primary storage now, as recovering from a discharged solid-state device is still somewhat unreliable even for the best service.
That’s not all, though. Human error is a very real thing, and the wrong person with the wrong level of access can accidentally reek some real have it. Older employees who aren’t the most computer-literate, or at least not used to more modern systems, could unknowingly reformat an entire hard drive without meaning to. With proprietary or complex business software, simply clicking the wrong button with a high level of permissions could result in any manner of chaos occurring.
And, finally, there is the joy of windows forcing updates in modern times. Sometimes, these updates actually break windows, causing entire windows-based servers and workstations alike to have to be put through system restoration. This can eat files alive, even if the option to save everything is selected. Fortunately, recovery services know how to fix this, and they can even often diagnose exactly what the update did to break things.
Upgrading various business software suites can also cause this problem, and then there is the cavalcade of malware and viruses that still float around the Internet, things that an employee can accidentally let into the system even when they aren’t doing things they aren’t supposed to during work hours.
You should shop for a data recovery service now, not when the disaster happens. Sooner or later, something will go wrong, that’s just math. Be ready for it, have a recovery service on hand and know that your data will forever remain safe!