5 Easy Tips to Prevent Data Loss

Prevent data loss before losing your data is not only a painful experience but it can cost a lot of money not to mention leaving you with serious gaps in your personal files. If you have carefully gathered the e-mail addresses and personal details of business associates and friends over many years, a corruption in your system can mean instant loss of all information.
Those of us who have experienced data recovery problems at first hand know that prevention is better than cure, so let\'s take a look at some things you can do to ensure you do not suffer the same fate.

If you have engaged IT managed services in your business you will no doubt have policies in place as well as backup practices which will minimise the possibility of losing data. But even with such systematic protection you can still use of these five easy tips to prevent data loss.

• Separate Your Backups. When you are backing up your data make sure that you use an external drive and never choose the same location as your original documents. Although this is common sense, it commonly occurs out of a misunderstanding of the nature of backup data. If your normal hard drive is corrupted then all the data stored is likely to be lost, which means that if you have backed up your files to the same hard drive they will be lost as well. A separate hard drive, preferably an external one, will not be affected by the operating system and can be used as a stand-alone storage facility.
• Beware of e-mail attachments. Even though you may be using virus protection software which may prevent the inappropriate opening of attachments to e-mails, the creators of these viruses have become more and more inventive by giving the e-mails an appearance of legitimacy. Make sure that your virus protecting software scans all attachments before they are opened.
• Store Your Backups Carefully. The best practice for data storage is to ensure that it is housed in a different location from your computer. This will prevent data loss in the event of fire or flood or similar natural disaster. Many businesses are choosing to store all data on external servers provided by companies like Amazon. This can be a cost-effective and extremely efficient way to safeguard against any data loss.
• Back up Regularly. You may notice that when you use certain programs, for example Microsoft Word, that there is auto save mechanism in place. You should follow this example by racking up all of your data every day, or, if you have a large amount of data being produced on a continuous basis, even more often.
• Test Your Backups. Check the validity of all backups at least once a month so you can be certain that all documents have been backed up correctly and are easily restorable.

Although these tips appear to be no more than common sense, they provide you with a good framework which will ensure that you maximise your protection against catastrophic loss of data and minimise the chances to have tmo look for data recovery services. 5 Easy Tips to Prevent Data Loss