Picture this…You have been working tirelessly for hours on a document or clustering data sets, you are almost finished and suddenly *poof*! You have no idea what just happened but your computer has suddenly shut down and you now find yourself praying that your work will still be there when you restart it. Thoughts of, “I’m sure I backed it up somewhere” to “oh no if I can’t get it back I don’t know what I’m going to do” fill your head. I won’t go into it anymore but you get the idea that data loss is definitely something we have all experienced at one extreme or another at some point in our lives.

Data loss is a touchy topic as it continues to affect almost everyone who will use a computer, phone or tablet in their day to day life. What makes it a touchy topic per say though is the aforementioned hypothetical scenario outlining the frustrating aspect of losing the vital documents or data that you have invested time and/or money into creating and analyzing.

With clients constantly asking us questions generally based around recovering lost files or data, at times it is almost too late to help as the damage may already have taken place unless you have set up a sure fire backup system to recover any of these documents. There are however other precautions that can be taken to minimize and prepare for any potential data loss scenarios which we will outline;

So What Are The Methods To Prevent Data Loss From Happening To Me?

  • Don’t Store Your Documents Or Data On The Same Drive As Your Operating System
    • In our experience, a majority of issues surrounding individual computers affect the operating system itself. Sometimes, the only solution is to format (completely wipe clean) the storage drive and as a result lose all data within that drive. Instead, a solution could be to simply install a secondary hard drive within a computer or attach an external one to your computer that can be utilized to save and store and documents or data. It is a low cost solution that can be easily transferable to different devices if formatting a drive is inevitable.
  • Invest In Antivirus Protection
    • We have spoken about this in depth in previous articles, however, we cannot stress enough the importance of being prepared for any malware or general viruses that may threaten to infect your system or network. At times an attempted hack has disrupted a system so much so that the user has no choice to buy a new system and accept the fact that they will lose all data on the previous one. Investing in such antivirus protection can heavily reduce this risk as long as the user remains educated on the matter in order to minimize any human error associated with allowing malware to enter a system.
  • Back Up Data Regularly
    • This somewhat goes hand in hand with our first method of investing in an external or secondary hard drive. Even if you are saving documents and data on this other hard drive, another good idea is to utilize a cloud platform to store these documents on. Here you are essentially hedging your bets so to speak of having multiple places to access your files if tragedy strikes on your system which is never a bad idea in this case.
  • Always Properly Shut Down Your System
    • Sounds so simple doesn’t it? The reality is that a majority of users would have at some point turned off their computer by the power point or had a power out at home that resulted in the device switching off unintentionally. What people don’t realize however is that if applications and documents haven’t been properly closed, they may still be running in the background when improper shut down occurs which can easily result in corrupted data that cannot be recovered from it’s original source.
  • User Error…It’s Sometimes The Problem
    • We can have all the antivirus software in place along with all the hard drives in the world, however, we are at times the engineers of our own problems. Make sure you utilize these suggestions and properly take initiative to prevent any data loss from happening. Take further caution when utilizing any Microsoft Office products as well by harnessing such features as tracked changes and storing any changes to documents that can be easily accessed if unintentional overwriting of files takes place.



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