How to choose a Good Data Recovery Service?

Data loss happens; it’s just as simple as that. The vast majority of critical business and financial documents is stored on business computers. Files and documents can be accessed much more quickly on a computer than from a file cabinet. If set up properly, those same files are accessible from anywhere in the world. The myriad of documents that used to fill rows of cabinets now lives on a single hard drive on a single computer. To be sure, all of your business eggs may reside in one digital basket.

We often pre-plan our emergency actions in preparation for fires, floods, earthquakes and other natural disasters. We take out insurance on our buildings and physical equipment to ensure that we can rebuild and start anew. However, when was the last time that emergency data recovery was a part of your pre-planning session? Honestly, you can rebuild your facility, restock your supplies and purchase all new office equipment. Even so, without your data, you have no business. It has been estimated that re-entering 20 megabytes of sales and marketing data would take almost 20 days at a cost of close to $17,000. Can your business afford to be down that long or spend that kind of cash to recover?

Natural disasters do not happen that often, right? Natural disasters actually account for only about 3 percent of all data loss. Hardware and system failures cause an estimated 44 percent; human error is responsible for an additional 32 percent. Hard drives are mechanical and they fail. People are human and they mess up. Are you prepared to recover from what constitutes 76 percent of all data loss?

Part of your disaster planning should consist of researching for and finding a reputable data recovery service. Data recovery prices vary greatly; so does the quality of service provided. File recovery is not an easy task on a physically failed drive. Even data retrieval from a logically impaired drive can have disastrous consequences if not done properly. Investigate several data recovery services to see what they offer and what kind of guarantee they have for their services. Find out if they have invested the time and money for expert training and top-notch equipment.

Find out if the service farms out their work or does it in-house. Find out what security measures they take to protect your business data. Once chosen, the service should work with you to implement a plan for emergencies. When the need arrives, they will be able to get your business back up and running in the shortest time possible.

Many services do more than just hard drive recovery. Some perform flash drive recovery and can retrieve photos from digital camera media. Some offer archival services, transferring your data from old storage technologies to the new, state-of-the-art media choices.