Your data management

If you have ever lost important data then you already know the importance of a robust backup system. If you are not backing up then I can't stress enough, now is the best time to start.

What is a hard drive?

Hard drives are rotating platters with magnetic surfaces; your data is digitally encoded onto these platters.

How long do hard drives last?

Hard drives are believed to have an average life span of 3-5 years. However this is a very weak measure and is dependent upon a huge number of variables such as environment and usage. There will be hard drives that have been running for 10 years+ and there will be hard drives that have failed after 10 minutes.

What are my options?

Backup can be very easy and cheap, here are a few examples:

• CD writers are very low cost, and can be fitted to nearly all computers, you are able to save you files to a disc a keep in safe storage, the drawback to this option is disc have a maximum storage and can be slow to read & write
• USB pen drives are low cost and are available with Gigabytes of storage and much faster option that CD writing
• External hard drives are available with much larger storage capacity than USB pen drives and are quick at reading & writing data, however they do become physically larger with these benefits
• All of these options are subject to physical damage, fire of theft
• Internet backup or offsite storage has become a much more user friendly option due to the increase in Broadband speeds. Files can be automatically scheduled to upload over night to a secure server. This stops the requirement for physical media to be managed
• Hard drive cloning and can be very useful for disaster recovery, this option takes a snapshot of a hard drive in a very similar to a photograph. All data can then be restored, recovering the computer to the time the clone was created.

If you would like to discuss in more detail what is the best solution for you then our engineers will be happy to assist.

Data Recovery

If you have lost data and require help then in some case data can be recovered. It is important that you shut down and stop using your computer. We are able to assess the best options for data recovery, from file deletion to hard drive failure, please contact our engineers to discuss your options, but please be aware that in the case of hard drives failures it may be very costly to recovery your data and there is never any guarantee it will be successful.

Hard drive data wiping

We are able to offer a data cleaning service, this is important if your hard drive or computer is going to a new home and it has previously had private information stored on it. Our methods clean media to the following standard: