Hard Drive Failure

Files become corrupted. Viruses hit. Laptops get dropped or stolen. And occasionally you just want to see an earlier version of a file you’re working on. If you’d rather keep, not lose, your photos, music, videos, documents, letters, and e-mail, then you need a backup program. You have several choices for this.

Local file-and-folder backup programs create copies on local drives or media, disk imaging software creates a snapshot of your entire drive, and online backup services automate uploading your data to secure off-site storage. In fact, you may want to use a combination of these.

The file-and-folder backup applications collected and protect only the files and folders that you specify, and typically give you the option of preserving one or more older versions every time it backs up the latest set of updated files.

Configuring the backup program to keep multiple versions of a file or folder; you’ll be able to retrieve yesterday’s version if you decide you don’t like today’s version. With these programs, it’s a good idea to back up your whole Documents, Photos, Music, and Videos folders and all their subfolders. To this, you can add any other folders you consider valuable.

A drive-imaging program, by contrast, makes a complete backup of your entire hard drive or of one or more partitions. This backup is an “image” of the entire drive. When you want to recover a file—any file—from a backed-up image, you use the file-retrieval function in the drive-imaging program to retrieve an older version of a file from the image and copy it to your hard drive.

Since your image includes system files as well, if your system ever becomes unusable you simply run the drive-imaging program from a bootable emergency CD, and restore your entire drive from an image that you stored on a removable drive or a network storage unit.

Data Recovery

In the most simple terms, “data recovery” refers to the process of recovering data from a hard drive, removable disk, or other type of electronic storage media (such as a backup tape drive, RAID array, server, database, flash memory, etc.) when the data is no longer accessible via normal means.

There are many ways to store data: hard drives, removable disks, CDs or DVDs just to name a few. No matter how reliable these storage products might be, any mechanical or electronic device can fail to function normally. In addition, there are many non-failure-related causes of lost or inaccessible data, such as accidentally deleting files, formatting/repartitioning a disk, or a forgotten password.  When normal methods for accessing data fail, data recovery is the process we use to regain safe, reliable access to that data.

Data recovery is usually an exhaustive process, requiring detailed work to recover the data.

Data Migration

Data Migration is the process of transporting data between computers, storage devices or formats. It is a key consideration for any system implementation, upgrade or consolidation. During data migration, software programs or scripts are used to map system data for the migration process.