Losing data can lead to the utmost inconvenience, and can even be detrimental to businesses, as it may lead to a loss in revenue. Protecting your electronically saved data is thus very important. If it does happen that your computer crashes or sustains significant damage, you might have to opt for professional hard drive recovery to save what information you can. It is very important not to attempt this yourself, as you might cause irreparable damage and lose the data forever.

Intratec Data Recovery has the necessary knowledge, experience and state of the art equipment to successfully do hard drive recovery. This includes a certified clean room – the only environment in which a hard drive should be opened for recovery to prevent further damage and to ensure the best possible recovery. Intratec Data Recovery is a leading data recovery service provider and has offices in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban.

The first and most reliable way to avoid accidental deletion or other forms of data loss is to make regular backups of your important files

User error isn’t the only way you can loose important data, photos, schoolwork or projects. You can experience a sudden power outage or power surge or even a dead hard drive. In case of hard drive failure, don’t keep your backups on the same drive you are backing up. Use another drive or burn them to a CD.

There are also free and paid online storage sites. A few offer up to 5GB of free space and include sharing. With any free storage site read the fine print. Some sites allow larger amounts of space but they limit uploads per month (1GB or less). In other words you can’t get large files uploaded all at once

• Did you backup all information on your hard disk drive?
• Although most current operating systems have driver support for most hardware have you made sure you have the diskettes/CD’s for your computer hardware devices so you can reinstall the hardware after erasing everything?
• If you are reinstalling Windows 98 or lower do you have a boot disk?
• Have you tested the boot disk or bootable CD to make sure it loads properly?
• Do you need an operating system CD or Restore CD to reinstall the operating system?
• Do you have the necessary licensing and OEM numbers needed to register your software again?

• The more important the data that is stored on the computer, the greater the need is for backing up that data.
• A backup is only as useful as its associated restoration strategy.
• Storing the copy near the original is unwise, since many disasters such as fire, flood and electrical surges are likely to cause damage to the backup at the same time.
• Automated backup and scheduling should be considered, as manual backups can be affected by human error.
• Backups will fail for a wide variety of reasons. A verification or monitoring strategy is an important part of a successful backup plan.
• It is good to store backed up archives in open formats. This helps with recovery process in the future when the software used to make the backup is obsolete. It also allows different software to be used.

In order to make it easier for data to be recovered in the event of a loss it is best to backup and store documents or data in Open Format. Whenever possible, avoid using formatted text such as a word .doc: using plain text (either ascii or .txt format) guarantees complete access for everyone, regardless of their software, their operating system or the computer they are using. In your emails, if what is important to you is the content and not the formatting, send the text directly in the body of your message instead of sending it as an attachment.

HTML format is the standard language for the web, and it was defined by a standardising international organisation. HTML is a flexible universal format, rich and compact. Native HTML (with no javascript) can carry no virus and can be read on any platform. Note: The HTML code produced by Word is semi-proprietary, and it is liable to include information that cannot be displayed on all platforms.

I recently became very blasé about my PC and allowed my C drive to get full, and I mean full. Apart from the fact that the computer slowed down to a trickle, when I opened up Explorer it started doing some strange things I had never seen before. Where the files had always been indexed in alphabetical order, they refused to index. At first I suspected my operating system (Windows 2000) was the culprit, and reloaded it, losing some files in the process (all my Outlook Express folders, Opera bookmarks and sessions etc.).

Fortunately I knew what to do, and have fully recovered everything, but then I know my way around computers. The moral of this is that I should never have allowed the situation to develop in the first place, and I only had myself to blame. Check your hard drive for free space at least once a week and if necessary clear up some space. If you don’t know how to do this, get someone to assist you.

· The more important the data that is stored on the computer, the greater the need is for backing up that data.
· A backup is only as useful as its associated restoration strategy.
· Storing the copy near the original is unwise, since many disasters such as fire, flood and electrical surges are likely to cause damage to the backup at the same time.
· Automated backup and scheduling should be considered, as manual backups can be affected by human error.
· Backups will fail for a wide variety of reasons. A verification or monitoring strategy is an important part of a successful backup plan.
· It is good to store backed up archives in open formats. This helps with recovery process in the future when the software used to make the backup is obsolete. It also allows different software to be used.

There are a number of different storage media that can be used for backups. These include:
· Magnetic tape – Magnetic tape has long been the most commonly used medium for bulk data storage, backup, archiving, and interchange.
· Hard disk – The capacity to price ratio of hard drives has been rapidly improving for many years. This is making it more competitive with magnetic tape as a bulk storage medium. The main advantages of hard disk storage are low access times, availability, capacity and ease of use.
· Optical disc – A recordable CD can be used as a backup device. One advantage of CDs is that they can be restored on any machine with a CD-ROM drive. In addition, recordable CD’s are relatively cheap.
· Floppy disk – During the 1980s and early 1990s, many personal computer users associated backup mostly with copying floppy disks. The low data capacity of a floppy disk makes it an unpopular and obsolete choice today.
· Solid state storage – Also known as flash memory, thumb drives, USB flash drives, CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, Secure Digital cards, etc., these devices are relatively costly for their low capacity, but offer excellent portability and ease-of-use.
· Remote backup service – As broadband Internet access becomes more widespread, remote backup services are gaining in popularity. Backing up via the Internet to a remote location can protect against some worst-case scenarios such as fires, floods, or earthquakes that would destroy any backups in the immediate vicinity along with everything else.

The most convenient backup system would have duplicate copies of every file and program that were immediately accessible whenever a Data Loss Event was noticed. However, in most situations, there is an inverse association between the value of a unit of data and the length of time it takes to notice the loss of that data. Taking this into consideration, many backup strategies decrease the granularity of restorability as the time increases since the potential Data Loss Event. By this logic, recovery from recent Data Loss Events is much easier and more complete than recovery from Data Loss Events that happened further in the past. Recovery is also related to the type of Data Loss Event. Recovering a single lost file is going to be substantially different and easier than recovering a whole system that was destroyed in a flood.

There are three types of backups, data backups, registry backups and system backups. Data backups are the ones most users know about but omit doing, but are sometimes the most important to the user. These are your documents, html files, spreadsheets, jpgs and so on.  The second category is registry backups. The registry holds important system information and is prone to virus attacks that can cause your PC to be unstable or even crash it. You should backup the registry from time to time. The third kind of backup is the system backup. The disk operating system (eg Windows 2000, Unix, Windows XP) is stored on your C drive, and without it the computer will not operate. Always keep the original copy of your operating system so that you can replace it if it becomes corrupted. It is essential that you carry out regular backups of your data and your registry.