Protecting irreplaceable data in information
technology has become increasingly important backing up digital information
limits data loss and aids data recovery. From conventional Tape back up to
external hard drives, CD's, DVD's and now remote storage backing up data
is an essential practice for every business and also many individuals.
Backup - is the copying of data to secure an
additional copy of original the original data. If the original data is
damaged or lost, the data may be copied back from that source, a process
which is known as Data recovery or Restore. The location of the backup is
equally as important as the content of the backup, removing the backup to
a remote location is an ideal solution although not always practical. The
reduced cost of external portable media such as flash memory and hard
drives has made removing backups to a remote location easier and more
practical. With the increased availability of DSL The option of backup
online via the internet to a remote location is also available
automatically realising the offsite backup requirement. There are many
companies offering this service and also software enabling transfer of
data via FTP to ISP provided web space. There are primarily three
different types of backup - full, incremental, and differential. A full
backup is simply the backing up of all the files on the system, an
incremental backup only backs up the files that have changed since the
most recent backup, a differential backup is a backup of all changes made
since the last full backup. We use SyncBackSE from
2BrightSparks.
Data Recovery - there are 2 main types of data
damage, Physical Damage - always causes at some data loss, and in many
cases the logical structures of the file system are damaged as well. This
causes logical damage that must be dealt with before any files can be
rescued from the failed media. A majority of physical damage cannot be
repaired by end users, who generally do not have the hardware or technical
expertise required to make these repairs; therefore, data recovery
companies are consulted. Logical damage is far more common than physical
damage and is primarily caused by power outages that prevent file system
structures from being completely written to the storage medium, but
problems with hardware as well as system crashes, can have the same
effect. The result is that the file system is left in an inconsistent
state. Third-party utilities are available, and some can produce superior
results by recovering data even when the disk cannot be recognized by the
operating system's repair utility.
Secure File Deletion - When normal deletion
methods like the Recycle Bin or the delete command are used, the
computer's operating system, for the sake of speed, creates an illusion
that data has been deleted. In fact, it merely earmarks that region of a
disk or drive as being available for new data to overwrite the old data.
Until that overwriting occurs, the old data can be retrieved with undelete
programs and tools used by data recovery labs and law enforcement
agencies. We use Cyberscrub Professional from
www.cyberscrub.com.
Searching the internet will generate a long list of
software developers and data recovery companies however first we recommend
you try the links to PC Inspector on this page and the bonus is they are
freeware.
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