Data Backup and Recovery- Essential for Businesses

First of all, we need to know the meaning of “data”. Data means a collection of statistics and facts for a special purpose. Data is relevant depending upon the need. Data can be characters, symbols etc can be used for analysis. Sometimes it can be used for reasoning and calculation also.

Backup means preventing the loss of data by storing the same data in various mediums. As data can be corrupted by many ways like viruses, weather, natural calamity, fire etc. So data should be preserved/stored at some other medium is necessary. You can store the data as a backup in Hard disks, in the form of cloud storage, or in any other storage device. If your data is corrupted, and if you are having the data in the form of “Backup” you need not worry. But if you are not having data as a backup, you will have nothing.

Recovery means after the loss of data, you can recover your data but only when you backed up the data. If you have not backed up the data you cannot recover it anyway. So the increasing demand of data requires the regular backup of the data. There are various tools/mechanisms available to us by which the data can be automatically recovered. It is not necessary that the whole data is recovered every time. You can selectively recover the data according to your need based on the available options.

The possible cause of damage to the operating system can be

• Physical Damage - A damage that interrupts the current working system physically is known as physical damage to the system. It can be due to fire, due to floods, due to natural disaster, due to earthquake etc.

Solution to physical damage: - The only solution to physical damage is to rectify the hardware, repairing of hardware, Hard disk etc.

• Logical Damage - Any software failure, bad sector, media errors, redundant data, corrupted partitions, corrupted file systems, lost data, viruses are known as logical damage.

Solution to Logical Damage: - Installation of data protection software in the system to avoid the effects of viruses and bad files. Avoid using multiple external storage devices.

Recovery of data- recovery of data can be done in four phases. The four phases are given below:-

1.    Phase one - Phase one requires the repair of hard disk. Whenever the hard disk fails, it the top priority to get the data back. In this phase the hard drive parts will be checked. For example spindle motor, PCB, Heads etc.

2.    Phase two - This phase requires to make the image of drive to another drive or new disk image file.

3.    Phase three - This phase requires the recovery of hard disk partition, file system, MBR etc.

4.    Phase four - The fourth and last phase of the data recovery mechanism requires rectifying the damaged files that were extracted from the backup. This is done in order to make the data again as readable.

It is recommended to make use of Microsoft office 365 backup for your important data.