Disaster Recovery: What You Need to Know About Hard Drive Failure

What can cause your hard drive to fail?

­­­A hard drive can be damaged due to firmware corruption, electronic failure, mechanical failure, a logical failure, a virus infection, or the drive developing bad sectors over time causing the data on them to be lost or unreadable.  Any one or a combination of these issues can throw your business into full disaster recovery mode.

Firmware refers to the information used by the computer to interact correctly with the hard drive. If the firmware fails or becomes corrupted, then important data on the hard drive is lost. An electrical surge can knock out the controller board on the hard drive and make it unusable.  Swapping the controller board with another one can prove to be dangerous as the information on the controller board is unique to the hard drive on which it is fitted. Mechanical failure includes head crash or  read/write head failure.  Head crash can occur due to physical shock, power surges and movement of the computer. Logical errors can occur due to corruption of the file system on the hard drive or improper entries in the file allocation table.

How you can recover your data

This is a time when it is vital to call the data recovery experts to enhance the possibilities of recovery. Whether the data on the hard drive can be recovered or not depends on the extent of the problem. Using special data recovery software and technical expertise, data can be recovered on any type of operating system including all versions of Windows as well as Apple Macintosh, Novell, Linux, IBM, and Unix.  Some issues can be resolved on site, but it may be necessary to remove the hard drive and analyze it at their location, recover the lost data, then return to reinstall it.  Data can also be recovered from tape drives, cds, dvds and other important storage media.

How to prevent expensive downtime

You can take preventive measures to ensure your data is secure.  Be sure to use reliable anti-virus and anti-malware software, blocking malicious programming that can destroy your system.  Routine backups are another layer of protection, and should be done routinely.  To avoid losing data due to a physical disaster, be sure to store your backup at a different location.  Beware though of tape backups, since all tape drives will fail at some point, without warning.  The best option is online backup, which can run automatically without user intervention – no changing tapes, or labeling disks – and can be accessed remotely to get you up and running quickly.

If you would like to learn how we can help please contact us sales@grlakes.com