Automate Backups

Data recovery experts have warned recently that data loss has greatly increased since the beginning of the world economic downturn.

Data integrity has been placed at risk in many companies due to a rise in cases of human error, they have revealed, as these companies have tried to cut costs by downsizing IT departments and paring back their budgets. The result of such cost-cutting has been a sharp rise in the number of mistakes by overworked staff and the resulting loss of vital data.

Companies that specialise in data recovery have reported a rise of up to 100 per cent in requests for emergency rescues as the recession causes businesses across the globe to tighten their belts. Many experienced the same phenomenon during the last recession of the late 1990s and have attributed this to a similar business strategy of cost-cutting and downsizing. The requests for help are largely concerning business-critical systems like databases and email servers.

There have also been reports of an alarming rise in data loss associated with the increasing use of virtual drives in office systems. Experts have revealed that many cases of data recovery they were engaged to perform were down to IT workers mistakenly deleting information on a virtual drive only to discover that there were no back-ups anywhere else on the system.

Other trends in the area of data recovery include the movement by many computer users to smaller storage media, such as memory cards, laptops, USB memory sticks and data cartridges. The increasing sophistication of mobile phone technology and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) ' especially the likes of the iPhone, with its many 'apps' ' has led to more clients finding problems retrieving the data they require from these portable devices.

Luckily, as the technology at risk from data loss changes and develops, so do the means of retrieving the all-important information, with advances in data recovery software being made all the time. Such tools make the job easier, but it cannot be stressed enough that they should not be used by amateurs or the untrained. For reliable data recovery it is still essential that clients engage the services of a professional service.