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Why We Lose Data
T Information technology has crept into almost every aspect of our lives which should give one a sense how absolutely important this data is. In fact, the fear of data loss has made backup of this data mandatory. In the event that data is lost there is of course help in the form of data recovery software. However, this is a very complicated and expensive process. If data recovery fails, we could stand to lose important data completely.
Reasons for Data Loss
There are several reasons why and how we could lose precious data. To begin with, one must understand that the whole world of information technology is precise, the details minute and the materials involved very sensitive. This being the case, it can be seen why a small error or an inadvertent mistake can lead to monumental losses. Data losses can happen due to natural, human and technical failure.
One could lose data due to fire, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, lightening etc. There could be technical failures like computer viruses and worms, hard drive crashes and failures, computer power failure and backup media -corruption.
There are statistics to reveal the major reasons that lead to data loss. The top five reasons would be hardware malfunction -44%, user error - 32%, software corruption -14%, computer viruses -7% and natural disasters -3%.
Common Problems
Like it was earlier mentioned, there are several reasons that could lead to data loss. In fact it doesn’t take an error of great magnitude but small oversights can cause huge data loss. Whether a professional or common computer user, everyone has a data loss story to relate.
It could perhaps be that one just forgot to invert the polarity when connecting the hard drive cable. In such a case the PC might be turned off without a problem but the computer could refuse to boot the next morning.
Even with the latest technology, data loss occurs. Hard drives have become faster and quieter over the years with amazing storage capacity. However, they are not particularly consistent. The inside of a hard drive is very like a record player divided into tracks and sectors. Aluminium alloy is used to make the highly polished platters. A head crash is a specific kind of hard disk failure when the read-write head touches the rotating platter resulting i huge damage to the magnetic media which in turn results in data loss.
Even the smallest bit of dust entering the sealed drive and settling on the magnetic surface can result in malfunction. One can drop a hard disk accidently to the floor resulting in data loss.
Temperature variations can lead to hard drive malfunction.
When the hard drive or mother board have gone bad, when the hard disk is not connected properly are all reasons that can lead to data loss.
A common user would do well to be aware of warning signs like when the hard disk stops spinning, an error message is received stating that the device is not being recognized by the system, information that could be accessed previously becomes inaccessible, a scraping or rattling sound can be heard etc. These are signs that something is not quite right.