January 20

How many times have we heard this statement uttered when a deadline has passed? Nowadays in our technology saturated world the more common excuse should be: “My Dog Ate My Data”.

While you may scoff at the prospects of this being a legitimate explanation, it happens more often than you think.

“In the last month, I have received 2 projects (1 thumb drive, and 1 SD memory card) that have been eaten by man’s best friend. Ironically, the thumb drive contained the college student’s thesis!
Unfortunately, both of these projects were DOA due to the fact that the flash memory chips had been completely cracked and roughly 20% of the actual chip material was missing.” — Doug Owens (San Diego Lab Manager)

Romildo Ruivo da Silva, Director of our Curitiba, Brazil lab, sees a similar trend. He reports that they receive many flash cards for recovery each month. At least one of them is blamed on a family pet. Household pets and critters seem to like data as much as we do.

This scenario, while amusing, can be quite serious. Under normal circumstances, flash media and USB thumb drives are sent in for recovery because:

  • The media is no longer recognized on the computer or camera
  • The media was accidently formatted or erased
  • The USB connector is broken or has become desoldiered.

“After delivering the unfortunate news to our college student above, I spoke to him about ways he could protect himself in the future. With his document-type data, I suggested even something as easy as emailing a copy to himself on a Hotmail or Gmail type account, that leaves copies on those servers. A lightbulb went off in his head and upon checking his Hotmail account there was a copy of his document there, and only about a month old!” — D. Owens

Proper use and care of these (and all) types of media will insure that data recovery doesn’t become a requirement for you. Make sure you have at least 2 copies of your important information. Consider having a copy stored in a different location (offsite). Utilizing different technologies (DVD and Flash, or HDD and tape) for your backups will make data loss less likely. Also be sure to test your backups from time to time.

But, when a problem does occur, take comfort in the fact that there are CBL specialists here to assist you.

Category: helpful hints, data loss prevention

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