July 30

Summertime brings with it a pretty consistent rise in data recovery requests at CBL related to the start of severe weather and storm season. Taking some simple precautions can go a long way to preventing data loss.

Four Things to Prevent Data Loss from Severe Weather

  1. Overheating can be a problem for hard drives: keep computers in a cool, dry area in an air-conditioned room
  2. Summer storms cause power blips: Make sure you’re utilizing a surge protector to protect from spikes. To help in power outages, an UPS can provide backup battery power which is helpful to prevent a spike causing a hard drive crash.
  3. In a flood-risk area? Keep equipment and cables at a reasonable height off the ground
  4. Take time now to do some backing up: External hard drives, USB thumb drives, CDs or DVDs are ideal to use as backup. They are easy to use and lightweight

How to Reduce and Respond to Severe Weather Data Loss

In the event that storm flooding, severe winds, or even a summer heatwave affects your digital hardware, here are some things to help you respond and minimize data loss. Two important things to keep in mind always: data is resilient and usually recoverable, and don’t panic!

  • Visible damage or flood-damage to devices? Don’t power on or try to use them;
  • Don’t open water-damaged media;
  • Don’t expose media to heat for the purpose of drying it;
  • Don’t attempt to even clean the media
  • If heat is the problem, move computers to a cool, dry location to prevent further overheating that can threaten hard drive functionality and data.
  • Don’t use software to attempt to repair a physically damaged drive – data recovery software is designed to operate on fully working drives with only ‘logical’ problems
  • Did we say don’t panic?
  • Place affected media in an airtight bag
  • Pack in a box with foam, bubble wrap etc to prevent movement
  • Send to CBL for free data recovery evaluation. (Learn how we can help here)

Category: data loss prevention, helpful hints

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Comments

  1. Paige
    Jul 30, 08:40 AM

    Great tips! The last thing people want is to lose all their data so these preventative tips are very helpful. Thanks for sharing!

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