Electronic Data is becoming more and more important in today’s modern businesses. Hard Drives have long replaced file cabinets and optical storage disks such as CDs or DVDs occupy less room than that stack of papers every employee used to have on his desk. Misplacing computer data is almost impossible now that every modern operating system includes a find feature. Misplacing data and loosing it are two different beasts. As a matter of fact, the majority of lost data is due to children downloading programs they thought were harmless or adults not using caution while surfing the net.
There are a few points you should take into consideration with electronic data, in order to prevent loosing it. The article refers to office computers, as they are the most exposed to data loss.
Running out of space, when dealing with constant data flow is a common way to loose critical data. For example, you own an e-commerce company, and you stack all your employees’ and customers’ data on a central computer. One day, when operations have run smoothly and you received a lot of data from customers, your hard drive gets full and you loose critical information, compromising your company’s image of professionalism. To prevent this, try to think ahead and calculate an average daily quota of incoming data. So if you receive 60 daily requests for information (totaling 14 Mb), 130 parcel deliveries (totaling 50 Mb) and 110 invoice payments (totaling 16 Mb), that means you have a daily data quota of 80 Mb and a yearly quota of 40 Gb of data. If you calculate your quota and it’s somewhere around 40Gb each year, buy storage of double that sum or even higher, to avoid complications. This is the simplest way to think ahead, so that you won’t run without space, neither will you spend big cash on huge storage hardware that you will never get to use completely.
Figuring out what data is critical for you and your company. Here’s the tricky part. Most people think that only a few data is “critical” to them, so they save it on a CD or DVD for safety. What they don’t realize, is that in a modern company, almost ALL data is critical. Don’t think that a two-year old job data is useless, you never know when the need to use it again arises. Don’t delete old data, just to clean up your site, rather put it in a clean hierarchy of directories so you can more easily manage it. Unless your company, or the company you work for has a retention policy that obligates you to delete certain files after use, for security and privacy measures, don’t delete data, or store old files on disks, in case you will ever need them again. You will only truly understand the importance of this measure when your company will have hundreds of clients and you won’t be able to keep track with what is critical and what is useless.
Last but not least, make sure your company computers have the right software installed on them: anti-viruses with up-to-date databases, anti-spyware programs, password protection, etc.. Also train your employees to learn how to properly use the computer, to scan new data when copying from an unchecked external storage source and to properly maintain hardware and software components. Remember, there are a lot of ways your data can get lost, ranging from user-mistakes, natural disasters (fire, floods, earthquakes, etc.) and hardware failures and it’s easier to prevent loosing data in the first place rather then recovering it after it got lost (a lot easier for your pockets at least).