Laptop Data Recovery Protects Your Important Information

The proliferation of laptops has brought the subject of hard drive data recovery back into the conversation for personal and business computers. Face it – your company’s desktop systems are tied into the network at all times. As long as you’ve set up a regular data backup and recovery system to run on your network, you can be fairly comfortably assured that the data stored on your desktop systems is essentially safe. That is – if the data on your company’s desktop systems is compromised, you’ll have backups to do restoration and get everything back up to full efficiency fairly quickly.

Your laptops, on the other hand, aren’t quite so easy to secure. In fact, every laptop you issue to employees represents a serious data loss risk for a number of reasons.

Because the laptops aren’t always connected to the network when your system is running backups, you’re far less likely to have a recent backup to use for data recovery if something compromises a laptop system.

If your employees travel with their laptops and use them in unsecured locations – airports, coffee shops and even hotel rooms – they’re more prone to hacking and software invasion.

Laptops are far more prone to the one kind of data loss that requires professional data recovery services – physical damage to the hard drive. The convenience and ease of traveling with a laptop carries with it the increased risk of damage to the machine. Laptops are carried around in and out of their cases, bumped against walls and doors, rattled as they ride around in vehicles and knocked off desks, tables and counters. Anyone of those jars, bumps or knocks can cause actual physical damage to the hard drive which results in data loss and necessitates the services of a data recovery company like Fields Associates.

Preventive Measures

There are, of course, a number of things you can do to decrease the chances of compromised data, data loss, hard drive damage and the need for a data recovery company among your company’s laptop users.

Every laptop should include a data backup utility that’s set to automatically back up the entire hard drive – or selected essential files – to the company servers and to offsite backup media on a regular basis. Your IT department should check those backups regularly to ensure that they’re being completed and that they contain the essential data.

Invest in heavy duty protective laptop cases for your entire fleet and require that laptops be transported in those cases.

Train all of your laptop users in how to recognize the signs of impending data loss and physical hard drive failure, and instruct them to immediately stop using their laptops if they notice any of those signs.

The last of those points is vital because continuing to use a hard drive after it shows signs of physical damage or impending failure risks destroying important data. If those instructions are followed by your employees, you increase the chances that a data recovery company will be able to retrieve any essential data from failed laptops.

Is Data Recovery The Right Option?

How do you decide whether to call in a data recovery company? When your computer fails and you can’t access important data, it’s easy to panic. Before you freak out and think that all is lost, there are a number of things you can do. If these steps fail, you can call in a data recovery company, such as Fields Associates or Fields Data Recovery.

Check Your Backups

If you have a backup routine, the first thing to do is to check your tape or disk backups. Depending on the routine your company follows, you may simply be able to restore the entire backup – onto a new hard drive, if possible, of course. Look for the most recent backup of the information and keep in mind that your backup won’t contain any modifications or entries after the date of the backup.

Even if you don’t do regular backups, all is not lost. Many times the important information you need may be stored elsewhere on the network or on another hard drive. If you only need one or two important files, you may be able to find them that way.

Recreating the Lost Data

Is the lost data in files that can be recreated? If the files are relatively static, such as address databases, recreating the lost files may be a more affordable option than doing a full data recovery. Other files, however, could be impossible to recreate. If you’ve lost access to a database that registers dozens of transactions a minute – or even an hour – recreating the file from scratch is more than likely completely impossible. If the records are vital, sending the drive out to a data recovery company may be your only option.

Consider Legal Ramifications

In many businesses, your data may be necessary to comply with regulatory and legal requirements. In that case, data recovery may be your only viable option.

Choosing a Reliable Data Recovery Company

Choosing the right data recovery company is nearly as important as deciding whether or not you should opt to have your data recovered at all. It can be especially important if you need the data for regulatory purposes. The best way to ensure that you are dealing with a reliable data recovery firm like Fields Data Recovery is to do your homework in advance when you have the luxury of time to research the firm’s reliability. Once your hard drive has failed, you’re not likely to have the time to ask around and check a firm’s references before employing them.

Why Data Recovery Preparation Matters More Than Ever

In these days of automatic backups and inexpensive offsite storage – in the cloud and at other data centers – do you still really have to worry about finding the right data recovery company in case of emergency? We polled a number of IT specialists and received a single answer from the all – a resounding yes. Despite the fact that businesses are more aware than ever of the necessity for data security and doing regular backups, there’s always a chance that something will go wrong – and when it does, it often spells disaster.

What Could Go Wrong? How Companies Fail in Data Recovery Preparation

Even the most careful companies occasionally fail to cover something obvious, but by far the most common error that businesses make is the most basic one of all – failing to back up their data at all. We’ve all grown comfortable with the notion that the computer will always start up and the files will always be there. The more advanced the computer system, the more likely it is that the employees who use it never consider what might happen if an outage cut off their access to their data.

The data recovery stories that stand out, however, are those in which the company’s executive officers thought they’d covered everything – only to be undone by something – often something blindingly simple – that they’d overlooked. Even the best data recovery plans can fall apart when you make one of these basic mistakes.

Backing Up the Wrong Data

When the data server’s hard drive failed, the owner of one small company thought he had it covered. After all, he’d had his IT guy making nightly backups so he could do data restoration for just this kind of problem. Imagine his surprise when he ran the data recovery program and found that the recovery disks were missing the accounts receivable and projects databases – the two files most needed to continue operation without interruption.

Forgetting to Run the Backup Program

One small business made a significant investment in backup software that was designed to run nightly. The IT department surveyed the staff to figure out which files were most important and set up the scheduled backups according to order of importance. When a virus compromised the data on the network hard drive, the data team when into action – only to find that the data tech who’d set up the program had neglected to complete the final step in configuring the program. The backup program had never run, and the company had to call in a Fields Data Recovery team to try to resurrect their missing files.

Those are just two of the many things that can go wrong even when you think you’re doing everything right. It’s always best to identify a data recovery option in advance so you’re not caught unprepared when the unexpected disaster strikes.

Choosing the Right Data Recovery Company

The very worst time to choose a data recovery company is when you’re in the middle of a data loss emergency. When your accounting department can’t pull up the customer list and your company’s work has ground to a halt because scheduling and planning software isn’t functioning, the last thing you want to be doing is calling random data recovery companies and evaluating which is the best one to handle your emergency. When you’re up against a wall, you’re vulnerable to unrealistic claims and sales pitches because you have to make a decision quickly.

Unfortunately, sending your drives and data to the wrong data recovery company can result in the permanent loss of your vital records. If you’re pressed to make a quick decision because your situation has already reached the emergency level, look for these factors to help you evaluate a number of data recovery companies before making your choice.

Look for a company that has a clean room – a sterilized environment in which the technicians can safely open drives and work directly on your damaged media. Without clean room support, the data recovery company can’t safely perform any physical procedures that might be needed to get your data back.

The best companies should be able to work on any type of software operating system. Be wary of data recovery firms that only work on Windows-based systems or Mac systems only. The more conversant the company is with recovery options for all types of systems, the better the chances are that they really know what they’re doing.

Physical proximity makes life easier for everyone, but don’t rule out a data recovery company just because they’re not located in the same area code as yours. Most data recovery companies can provide you with detailed instructions on how to safely ship your media to them, and many provide the packaging to ensure that your devices travel safely.

Make sure that the data recovery company you’re working with has a full service laboratory as well as a clean room. Get recommendations from others who have used them, and be wary of any company that doesn’t list a physical address and telephone contact information. The data recovery field is littered with “companies” that are no more than an amateur working in his basement – not exactly someone you want to trust to handle your sensitive data.

The best way to avoid having to make a data recovery decision in a hurry is to do your research in advance and identify a data recovery firm like Fields Associates to handle any data loss emergencies that might happen in the future.

Hard Drive Data Recovery: What to Do When Your Hard Drive Fails

Hard drive failure and data loss costs the average company from $500 to $2,500 per incident, with the higher end of the figure coming into play if the company had to call in an outside professional data recovery company. The most common cause of data loss leading to a need for data recovery is hard drive failure. Since hard drives have a limited life, hard drive failure is inevitable. If you plan carefully, though, hard drive failure doesn’t necessarily have to lead to data loss. These strategies can help you deal with hard drive data recovery and reduce the chances that you’ll need data recovery services from an outside company.

If a system hard drive fails to boot, immediately shut the computer down. If the data on the drive in question is critical to your firm and you have no backup, do not attempt to recover the data yourself. Any action you take carries the risk of making it impossible for even the best data recovery companies, such as Fields Data Recovery, to retrieve your files. Immediately contact a professional data recovery company to get instructions.

If, on the other hand, you can afford to lose the data on the drive, you can attempt some do-it-yourself data recovery options. Avoid using system software, such as chkdsk, to repair the file system, though. Most system recovery software is designed to repair your file systems, not preserve the data. There’s a good chance that the system will overwrite your data. If it’s not overwritten, it may be in chunked files that will take days to piece together.

Before you attempt any DIY data recovery operations, determine whether the disk failure is due to a software problem – deleted file, virus or operating system failure, for example – or a problem with the physical drive. If it’s software-related, you can attempt to recover the data using data recovery software. Before you do, though, remove the hard drive from the computer and install it in a USB enclosure to minimize disk utilization during boot and reduce the chances of causing more damage. Follow the instructions on your data recovery software. Again, if the drive contains mission-critical data, don’t even try this. Contact a pro data recovery service and hand the job over to them.

Do not open the drive case or attempt to swap the disk to a new drive. In either case, you risk destroying the drive and making it impossible to recover any data from the disk even for the best professional hard drive data recovery services.

If there are bad sectors on your drive, do not attempt to repair the bad sectors or read data from them with data recovery software. Either one may overwrite the underlying data or destroy it entirely.

Never attempt to power up a system that has suffered physical damage from water, fire, electrical failure or vandalism. Instead, contact a professional data recovery company to do the job for you.

Avoiding the Need for Data Recovery ServicesData

Data recovery, particularly recovering data from solid state hard drives and RAID hard drives, can be an expensive and time consuming process. These days, with the ease of setting up automatic backups and offsite storage performed over the Internet, there should be little need for data recovery services, but the professional data recovery companies like Fields Data Recovery still thrive. Unforeseen things happen, but most data recovery emergencies seen by professional data retrieval firms could have been avoided by taking a few simple steps.

Prioritize Your Data

With the enormous amount of data that most computers collect over the course of a day, it’s not always practical to back up every bit of data on every computer every day. Identify the files and databases that are the most vital to your company’s processes, as well as those most likely to change daily or more often, and mark them for the most thorough backups, at least once daily. That way your most important company information will never be more than 24 hours out of date. Less sensitive data can be backed up weekly, and you can schedule full backups at less frequent intervals during the year. By prioritizing data and scheduling backups according to importance, you’ll be able to get your most vital operations up and running again as soon as possible after an emergency or outage.

Check Your Backups

One of the most common errors that the technicians at Fields Data Recovery and other companies like them see is a failed backup. Automated backups do you no good at all if they’re not functioning properly. Don’t just assume that everything is working well. Do regular checks to make sure that your data is actually being backed up as expected. The last thing you need is to try to restore from a backup only to find that your automated process stopped functioning weeks ago.

Identify a Data Recovery Company

Identify a data recovery company before you need one. Even if you have complete faith in your backup routine and are certain that you’ll always be able to restore your backup files yourself, it’s always best to be prepared. Do your homework in advance so that you know exactly where to turn if the unthinkable happens and you need to call in a professional to attempt to restore your files and other important data.

You can insulate yourself from most data risks by initiating and following a regular data backup program that backs up your most important data for retrieval in case of an emergency. Sometimes, though, you may need to call in a professional data recovery firm like Fields Data Recovery to get your business back into operation as quickly as possible

How to Evaluate Data Recovery Services

The very last time in the world that you want to be evaluating data recovery services is when you’re in desperate need of them. Let’s face it. When you’re sitting there with a pancaked hard drive that contains business files that are essential to your company, you’ll believe anyone who tells you that they can get those files back for you – tomorrow. Decisions made in panic mode aren’t always the best.

That’s why the best time to find a data recovery company to work with is before you need one. In fact, identifying a reliable, honest and good data recovery service should be part of your disaster recovery plan – and yes, a disaster recovery plan should be an essential part of your IT security. Your disaster recovery plan should identify how you back up your data, where you store the backup files and how you’ll restore them in the event of a corrupt drive, a fire or any other disaster that makes it impossible for you to access your essential files. It should also identify the data recovery company you’ll contact in the event that your own data retrieval efforts fail. Choosing the right data recovery service to work on your files is an essential part of the process.

Ask around among other professionals. Most IT professionals have had to deal with data loss at one time or another in their careers. Ask professions you respect who they’d send their own most sensitive data to if they needed the services of a professional data retrieval firm.

Check out the reputations of the companies suggested online. A thorough Google search of the company’s name with +complaints will turn up any complaints and problems against the company and give you an idea of how reliable they are.

Pick up the phone and contact the companies you’ve identified. Let them know up front that you’re identifying data recovery professionals for your disaster recovery plan and ask to speak to a technician or sales rep. Determine if they have clean room facilities for opening hard drives for hard drive data recovery, and propose a few scenarios to ask how they’d handle the situation.

While your budget is important, price shouldn’t be your primary consideration when weeding out data recovery firms. Ask about prices and capabilities as a means to compare the company with others that you contact, but put more weight in the answers they give you to your possible scenarios and your other questions.

Once you’ve chosen a data recovery firm, follow their instructions for handling various data emergencies and write them into your disaster recovery plan. It’s important that everyone in your company is aware of the steps to take in a data loss emergency.