Is My Data Really Gone? What is Data Loss and How Does it Work?

Nearly everything we do involves data in one way or another. Accessibility of information is an essential aspect of every business culture and having local and hosted solutions for data storage is vital.

However, with the constant threat of cyber attacks and large-scale data corruption, businesses may wonder how safe their data really is and what happens if and when important files are deleted.

Let’s take a look at what data loss is and what really happens when you lose important data.

What is data loss?

While the term “data loss” has obvious connotations, many people have some misconceptions about its finality. This lack of understanding in this area has caused some people to completely abandon all efforts to recover their data once they’ve deemed it to be lost, stolen, or deleted. The fact of the matter is, most data doesn’t become lost at all. Instead, the data is just inaccessible to the user and requires different methods of recovery.

Understanding Hard Disk Storage and Deletion

Hard disk storage remains one of the most common ways to store data for both personal and business use.

While certain types of damage to these physical drives may make your data unrecoverable, in nearly all cases, lost data is the result of logical damage caused by power outages, system crashes, or manual file deletion. However, in most cases, the information still lives on these drives – you just need to know how to find it.

Deleting files from a hard drive doesn’t erase the data itself, but rather the “pointers” that make it easier for a user to locate it. This is the case for both local and hosted storage solutions and can be reversed with the use of restoration programs.

While some data may become corrupted or harder to find after certain types of removal, there are many different options available to help recover these system files.

What About Your Deleted Emails?

There are other areas where data loss could present an issue besides local computer storage.

Email is the primary method of business communication (with both internal and external partners). As this is the case, accidental removal of essential data stored in messages from earlier correspondence can be difficult for companies to deal with.

The critical thing to remember is that nothing managed through the internet is ever truly gone. Internet caching helps to preserve digital content at an astronomical level, and in many cases, it may be possible to recover your lost emails, even after removing them entirely from your trash folder.

Since internet service providers typically keep backup copies of client inboxes, deleted emails can usually be recovered in a few different ways.

Keeping Your Data Protected

With today’s advancing technologies, nearly all devices and storage options have built-in backups to help data from becoming unrecoverable. While sometimes not completely necessary, these solutions provide a safety net for your lost data during a catastrophic system failure or following a malicious attack from an outside source.

Making it a habit to format these solutions before utilizing their storage capacity will help ensure that, regardless of how permanent your data loss may appear, you should always have a way to recover it.

While data loss can mean disastrous consequences for businesses who heavily rely on data integrity, it’s important to know that in nearly all cases, data can be fully recovered with the right tools and services.

Vision knows just how important data protection and recovery is. If you’d like to learn more about how to avoid permanent loss of your digital assets, send VCS a message today.