Regular data backups are of paramount importance in today’s information technology orientated business climate. Although many businesses and computer users may live by the mantra ‘It’ll never happen to me’, there is a very high chance that, somewhere along the line, all of us will lose vital data forever due to not having a serviceable backup available to restore it from.

Major data loss can occur at any time, and for a number of reasons. There are lots of ways that important data can be lost or corrupted at any given time, some of which are listed below:

A computer is stolen, or left behind in a public place. There have been several high profile cases of this happening reported in the media over the past few years, with laptops being the type of machine most susceptible to this kind of data loss. As a result, highly sensitive data has been lost forever, or even, if it should fall into the wrong hands, accessed and brought out in to the public domain.

A computer is damaged or even destroyed either in accidental circumstances such as being dropped, or in a natural disaster such as fire, floods etc. When a hard drive is damaged in this way, it is exceptionally difficult to try and recover data from it as parts or even all of the drive could become inaccessible, making a retrieval of important data practically impossible.

A power cut or a power surge irreparably damages the power supply to a machine, which in turn shorts out the rest of the components that it uses including the hard drive. Just like the situation above, this is one of the hardest occurrences to recover from as quite often the hard drive will become completely unreadable, thus rendering the data lost without any chance of it being recovered from the same drive.

User errors – an employee unintentionally and permanently deletes certain files or folders which they cannot then recover themselves.

Infection of a system by viruses, spyware, malware etc – more often than not these malicious programs are capable of, and indeed intend to erase some or even all of the data on the hard drive concerned. It may be the case that a solution as extreme as a complete formatting of the hard drive and a reinstallation of the operating system is required should all other attempts at removal fail.

Failure of the machine’s hard drive. This can happen at any time and it eventually will – unfortunately it is not a case of if it will stop working, but when it will stop working. Happily most new hard drives are now guaranteed to last for at least a few years, but it has long been one of the main causes of data loss, and the sheer unpredictability of it means that this kind of event can occur when you least expect it, and when you least need it.

Oakford Backup is a brand new online backup solution from Oakford Technology, which aims to properly account for all of your company’s critical data should events such as these occur, meaning complete peace of mind for employers and employees alike. Our unique service ensures that, no matter where the data is saved on the network, it will be picked up and it will be replicated efficiently and securely to our UK only data centres. These operations can be run at a time to suit your business, and our custom made software is so easy to use that missing data can be restored to a system within minutes by someone with even the most basic computer skills.