Today’s economy is driven by information. For thousands of years, goods and services were produced by physical work done by humans. The industrial revolution changed all that. Machines were invented and a lot many things were automated, thus leading to faster production and increased wealth all around. A couple of decades ago, another sea change occurred in the way the world’s economy functioned.

The invention of the personal computer by Apple and its easy availability because of IBM’s open architecture ensured a paradigm shift. Computers turned out to be formidable force multipliers which could do the work of hundreds of people, thus cutting down workforce levels and increasing productivity substantially. The world economy has not looked backed since.

Computers cannot process or store any information till it is in the digital format, that is, it is broken down in a string of ones and zeros that the silicon processor can recognise. This binary code can be represented in many ways, such as presence and absence of electric current, north and south orientation of magnetic particles or presence and absence of microscopic pits on a recording surface.

Many storage devices have been invented around these data-recording technologies, such as optical disks, hard disks, tape drives, floppy disks, USB drives and so on. These devices are very small in size but can easily hold all the information stored in the books of a large-sized library. The digital data can be easily copied as many times as one wants by a single command. It can be sent instantly over a network to any part of the world or transferred from one device to another.

However, digital data by its very nature is not as durable as non-digital data, such as that printed on paper. It is a sad fact of life that the former can vanish in the blink of an eye due to many reasons. These mainly can be categorised as hardware and software causes.

Hardware causes include cases where the storage device has developed some mechanical defect or malfunction in some of its components. In a hard disk, the spindle motor may stop working, the read / write head may come crashing down on the platter surface or the controller card or circuit board may get fried. In an optical disk, the data-recording surface may develop scratches or get corrupted. Software causes relate to some problem with the digital data itself. The user may accidentally delete some file or even reformat the storage device. The software may get corrupted or there may be a virus attack.

Massive data loss can also occur due to disasters, both man-made and natural. The former includes cases of arson and terrorism which may hit a business premises and destroy all digital equipment. The natural causes relate to the fury of the elements, such as lightning strike, fire, floods, earthquakes and volcano eruption.

Data loss is a very serious matter that has huge financial implications for companies. Many of them have been known to close down after they lost all their data abruptly. Once companies have been hit by a data disaster, they have no option but to take immediate steps to get it recovered professionally. This is because no work is possible in today’s computerised office without access to the data residing on computer hard disks. In its absence, everything comes to a standstill. Employees sit idle, leading to loss of man-hours. All this translates into financial losses as productivity becomes zero.

The only hope the hapless company has of bouncing back is to get the data recovered as soon as possible.  But this is not an easy procedure. It requires technical skill, patience and appropriate infrastructure, including a clean room, special equipment and customised software. Most recovery companies charge according to per MB of data recovered. When a huge amount of data has to be extracted, this comes out to be a tidy sum and burns a huge hole in the company’s balance sheet.

In cases of data loss, the age-old adage of “prevention is better than cure” stands true. The best and most cost-effective way to shield your business from data disasters is to take regular data backups. There are a huge variety of inexpensive but high-capacity storage devices available today which are suited for different types of backup needs.

The most popular of these include optical disks, tape drives, portable hard disks and USB flash drives. The storage capacity of the media ranges from 740 MB (compact disks) to 500 GB (portable hard disks). But the safest and most hassle-free option for storing your data is remote backup. In this, your data is automatically sent at regular intervals over wires to servers located very far away, often in another city or even another continent, thus ensuring that your files remain safe even when your office is damaged due to some disaster.

If you have data backup, you can immediately copy your files to new computers and get back to business without any delay.

James Walsh is a freelance writer and copy editor. If you are concerned about data loss and would like more information on Data Recovery see http://www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk