With the advancements in technology, the world has become digitized. Consequently, many big companies and small businesses have become paperless and store all of their data in a central system or cloud.
The use of a cloud system provides numerous benefits as you can have to all company data in one place. But it comes with certain drawbacks as well. What if one day you woke up to the news that you have lost all of your essential data?
What would you do then? Loss of data means loss of customers and clients, and ultimately you will be out of business. Losing data is one of the biggest fear of any business. Therefore, you should adopt practices to avoid data loss if not, then at least minimize it’s extent of damages.
In this article, we will explain the best practices for data recovery.
7 Best Practices for Data Recovery
All businesses are actively seeking for some good practices to recover lost data. It is very important to understand which practices can result in permanent data loss. So, avoid those things that can cause data loss and adopt practices to recover data.
In this section, we have explained 7 best practices for data recovery.
1. Create a Backup
Creating a backup of your data is one of the most significant necessities of the time. It is one of the best practices to date for data recovery if you lose your important data. Recovering data through a backup can save your time and resources otherwise needed to recover data.
When you have backup data, it allows your team to respond to data loss and recover data quickly. Thus, it would not affect the normal functioning of a business. There are numerous backup options you can either store your data in a hard drive or go for a cloud backup. Moreover, cloud backup offers flexibility and is cost-efficient.
2. Don’t Install Anything
The most common mistake people make when they lose data is to install the data recovery software. Don’t do this. I repeat never install any data recovery software. Or if their operating system fails to boot the reinstall operating system. However, doing so gives more damage than good.
There are high chances that when you install data recovery software, it might overwrite your lost data. As a result of which you will permanently lose all of your important files and documents. You can run data recovery software but not fail hard disk. Run it somewhere else to recover your data.
3. Don’t Format Drive
Generally, when a hard disk fails, an interface appears on the screen asking to format the drive. Usually, people click yes to format the device as they think that problems might occur due to corruption. However, it can worsen the situation and make it impossible to recover your data.
Thus, as a part of the best practice for data recovery to avoid formatting drive. Because although formatting can repair most files, it will cost you a permanent data loss, which I am sure you cannot afford. Therefore, never format your device without prior thinking. It is always best to use some professional data recovery software or a data recovery service.
4. Don’t Go for In-Place Repair
Some people, to recover their lost data, went for an in-place repair. However, it is one of the biggest mistakes they made, which results in permanent data loss. For example, Windows user-run CHKDSK on the failed hard drive to retrieve data. CHKSDK is used to fix file and disk corruption.
However, the problem with CHKSDK and a similar tool is that they perform write operations. But what if assembling data incorrectly or overwriting affected memory blocks, leading to data corruption and eventually losing data? Therefore, a better alternative is to use S.M.A.R.T-an in-built monitoring system to fix corrupted files before losing any data.
5. Boot from External Media
We have already explained why you should not boot from an affected drive or the operating system. However, to recover your files and documents, the best way to boot system is by using some removable external device. You can go for a USB flash drive or an external hard disk.
It will reduce any chances to increase corruption as well as minimize wear and tear on the drive. Booting from infected devices increases the damage and makes it difficult to recover data. So, always use external media to boot devices. In this way, the operating system cannot hide or lock any files or data.
6. Install Automation
Automatic backups are always a better option than manual backups. Because sometimes people might forget to do manual backups. But as far as automatic backups are concerned, it will be automatically done from time to time. Usually, in small firms, only one person is doing manual backups, and when he leaves, the process of taking backups stops.
Therefore, a better option is to use Self-Monitoring Analysis Reporting Technology. It will automatically monitor hard disks, so notify in case of any possible failures that might result in data loss.
7. Save Data in a Separate Device
Another effective way for data recovery is to save data in a separate device. Once you recover your data, it is always better to save on another device or hard disk. Because there are high chances that hard disks which get infected once can get infected again. Moreover, it also prevents the overwriting of the data.
Saving data in a separate and safe device is always a better option and practice. And it will save a lot of your time, resources and efforts in the future if anything goes wrong. Besides, if you use any professional recovery software, it will automatically save data in a new device. It can differentiate between the source of recovering data and the place where it is storing data.
Final Words
Losing important data is the biggest fear of any company. However, we have explained best practices in this article that anyone can adopt for hard drive data recovery and minimize the effect of data loss.
Interesting related article: “What is Cloud Computing?“