Data Recovery vs Disaster Recovery

Data recovery is a part of disaster recovery. Both complement each other playing an equally vital role in the survival of a business or organisation in the global market. The loss or failure of data could automatically lead to a disaster and vice versa. A business disaster could automatically erase important data. In a nutshell, data recovery refers to a process of salvaging data damaged or contaminated, existing on a portion of the hard drive.

While disaster management is a much broad-based term encompassing business and IT-related disasters whereby all business information is lost as a result of natural calamities or man-made problems such as terrorist attacks. Thus, disaster recovery is a holistic process of recovery while data recovery is a refined and focused method of salvaging limited amount of data.

Causes

Data loss or failure usually is small with far-reaching impacts. Data loss is usually caused by the operating system, hard drive and software failures. Therefore, it becomes imperative to have knowledge about the workings of a computer. One is easily able to recognise the type of data loss being incurred, and has the expertise and knowledge to deal with it. Data loss can be catagorised into two types:

General data loss where data can be recovered simply by using the data recovery tools available on the desktop of the computer.

Specific data loss where the individual experiencing data loss is unable to retrieve the data using computer data recovery tools and has to consult data recovery specialist agencies such as MASTERLINK.

Data loss usually occurs when:

The computer fails to reboot
Excessive sun exposure to the diskette
The diskette is carelessly tossed about in water or in any other beverage leading to surface contamination and damage
The diskette has inaccessible drives and partitions which could cause virus contamination leading to hard drive failure
The data stored is corrupted or in strange inaccessible characters which may lead to an inability to load and run the computer.

Data loss forms a small but integral part of Disaster recovery programs. Disaster recovery is mainly used by businesses to protect themselves against loss of data, business and marketing information including strategies. Disaster recovery programs come into play when there is:

Man- made disasters of terrorism and theft
Natural disasters of fire and flood

When these disasters do happen, businesses are likely to lose their entire vault of information and become paupers in the global market. Thus, it is highly imperative for every business to have a business disaster or contingency plan. These plans must follow a few golden rules to be effective:

Business Contingency plans have to be workable and reliable. They should not be out of the working reach of the organisation. Contingency Plans in this regard have to:

Be devised in accordance with the current market situation. The plan must be able to guide the business in terms of profit, loss, employee retainment, market competition and production in the The plan should also be built keeping in mind the organisational structure. This includes the organisational hierarchical tree, the number of employees and organisational goals.

Contingency plans must advocate the path of containment of the disaster as well the way to future business growth and development. It must outline marketing strategies, learning methodologies, profit and demand structures, employee training and recruitment methods.

The contingency plan must outline a backup plan or site which enables organisational members to salvage important crucial business facts for future growth. However, it must be kept in mind that organisations seldom follow these guidelines. More than 53% of businesses have unworkable outdated contingency plans. Out of this 53%, 23% are often required to use these contingency plans. And ultimately only 6% of organisations manage to survive these disasters. In contrast, more than 88% of businesses face some amount of data loss. According to MASTERLINK, management companies usually have backup files to deal with data loss. Data loss is not permanent and data can be retrieved after some time. Companies such as Quartz, Hewlett Packard and Dell employ computer trouble shooting experts to combat problems of data loss. The necessity of these contingency plans comes to the fore owing to changing market climate.

Reasons

Growth of technology: The global market is increasingly becoming technologically oriented. Organisations and businesses now increasingly rely on information technology to store crucial business information. Thus, data loss and ultimately any sort of disaster have the potential of devastating effects. It can destroy the organisation of any opportunities for growth and development. In such a scenario, it becomes important for every organisation to depend on personnel to document and store important information in paper files.
A business also has to safeguard against fires and flood which can rip the entire business structure apart. It has to constantly update any contingency plan and inform its employees. Employees need to be aware of any problems that might arise. Every organisation ought to maintain a storage accessible area away from the main organisational structure. This ensures backup.

However, the suitable measure for any business is to have a contingency plan to protect itself against any data loss and disaster. It is important to remember that information is power. And if information is lost, power, authority and success fall in jeopardy.