ANY DEVICE

Consistently backing up your data is the only way to prevent data loss. Accidents, mechanical malfunctions, and viruses cannot be completely prevented.

24 Hour Data suggests businesses to backup their data every 24 hours and personal home computers every week. Studies have shown that more than 50% of businesses who lose their data for more than 10 days file bankruptcy within one year.

Data loss is caused by a variety of different occurrences including accidents, virus, excessive heat, exposure to water, mechanical failure, file corruption, deletion, partition loss, and many others.

If your hard drive begins to make an unusual noise you should turn it off immediately. The clicking noise is caused by the failure of the head to read data from the disk. This could actually be caused by several different failures on the drive, and continuing to use the drive or attempting to recover the data by using software recovery tools like “chkdsk” could do more damage and cause a permanent loss of data.

On computers running a Microsoft Windows operating system seeing a blue screen (as known as the “blue screen of death”) indicates a critical system error which has caused the system to shut down to prevent damage. It can be caused by a memory failure, bad power supply, overheating, and hardware failure. The computer system should be shut off immediately and a computer repair specialist should be contacted.

A failed hard drive should be shut off immediately and a computer specialist should be contacted. Attempting to recover data through the use of a disk utility program after a hard drive has failed could cause a complete loss of data. Disk utility programs are meant to be used on functioning hard drives as a preventative measure against failure.

Yes. There are circumstances when physical damage to the hard drive is so severe that no data can be salvaged. The data is stored on metal coated ceramic or aluminum disks within the hard drive. If this metal coating comes off then the data is lost forever. Cycling a failed drive on and off after a failure has occurred can cause the disks to be scratched and the data to be lost forever.