Have you ever accidentally deleted a file and wondered how to get it back? Now imagine your business lost all its data. This happens more commonly than you may think. Data loss is a real and growing threat to your business. Here is what you need to know about data recovery in St. Louis and beyond.
The data recovery services industry specializes in retrieving and restoring data that has been lost or damaged. The culprit can be a natural disaster, like a flood or fire, or it can be a cyber attack, a power outage, a technical malfunction, or even human error.
Restoring lost or damaged assets becomes simpler when a business has a plan in place for backing up critical information. Data recovery experts can work from wherever the backup data is stored—an external hard drive or cloud-based solution, for example—to retrieve the missing data.
It’s easy to think, “It won’t happen to me,” but data loss happens all the time. In the U.S., 140,000 hard drives fail each week, yet 58 percent of small and mid-sized businesses are not prepared for data loss, according to this recent infographic by Clutch, created in honor of World Backup Day.
Cyber crime—in particular, ransomware—is on the rise in St. Louis and beyond. These attacks compromise company data, and they can be catastrophic; 60 percent of small companies victimized by a major cyber attack go out of business within six months, according to the National Cyber Security Alliance.
To improve their chances of successful data recovery, St. Louis businesses must take preventative measures that include a comprehensive approach to backing up data. Should your business have trouble retrieving an important file or data source, consider these three steps.
Don’t Panic
Losing a file can be harrowing, but take a minute to catch your breath and think clearly. When you delete a folder on your computer, it hasn’t necessarily been wiped from your operating system. Unless the system has written new data to the same area on the disk, your information is likely still on the machine. Often, data can be retrieved if you connect with the right experts quickly. Of course, accidentally deleting a file or two is quite a different scenario than losing an entire hard drive or being victimized by a cyber criminal, but regardless of the breadth of your data loss, try not to let emotion override good decision-making.
Choose the Right Data Recovery Expert
If you have in-house IT experts or an outsourced managed IT services provider, give them a call. If not, you can do some troubleshooting yourself. But depending on the scope of the data loss, you may need to find a reliable data recovery services company.
Some data recovery firms request that you mail in your failed hardware and then charge you based on how much data they recover. You could be left footing a hefty bill if they are even able to retrieve the data. There are no guarantees.
An expert who can visit your office is probably a better bet. Although it’s important to act quickly when it comes to critical data recovery, make sure to research your options carefully. (This is one of the many reasons why it is better to have a data recovery plan in place before you lose something.) Try reaching out to colleagues for vendor recommendations. Data recovery takes skill, and who you partner with could determine the outcome of your predicament.
Be Prepared
Data loss costs companies $1.7 trillion a year. Mitigate losses by taking precautions. Use a dual-destination backup approach in which you back up data onsite (to an external hard drive, for example) as well as remotely via a cloud backup provider. Regularly test your backup recovery strategies to ensure you can quickly and effectively restore data.
Using cloud-based software can help you mitigate data loss in the first place. For example, solutions like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive offer file version control so you can easily retrieve earlier iterations of files if you mistakenly overwrite something.
Most business owners don’t realize the importance of data recovery services until they need them. Anderson Technologies specializes in data recovery for St. Louis businesses. It uses sophisticated backup and data recovery tools to support its managed services clients as well as to help new customers in need. Its data recovery experts have been able to successfully retrieve data that other vendors could not. For more information, email info@andersontech.com or call 314.394.3001 today.
