Data Recovery and Backup

Everyone who owns a computer will eventually experience hard drive failure. The causes can be anything from human error to damage resulting from floods, fire, or water. Viruses can play a role as well, along with many other factors. For many years, the need to recover data that has been lost or destroyed has made planning for data recovery a necessary practice.

Almost all hard drives can be recovered if there is little or no physical damage.  Sometimes, due to age or bad parts, the aperture arm in the hard drive can fail, or the platters can become damaged and lose the data that they hold.

If you have multiple hard drives on your computer, RAID configurations can be recovered. If a single hard drive on the RAID configuration fails, the RAID setup will absorb the loss and there won’t be a loss of data.  On the other hand, if the entire RAID configuration crashes, it will crash big time. If you can’t recover the information with software, you’ll need to send it off and have technicians restore both the RAID hardware and software.

3-2-1 Backup

Most businesses today can’t wait days, weeks, or months for backup – a serious failure can close your business for days, and more than a few days can mean closed forever. 

The 3-2-1 rule for backup is simple: three copies of your data, two local (on different devices), and one off-site. This means the original data on your PC (or network computer), a backup on an external hard drive, and another on a cloud backup service.

Tech Radar reviewed some of the best backup services for 2021, and companies like Norton, Carbonite, iDrive, and BackBlaze all offer affordable options. Check with our team to see which plan might be best for you.