Protect And Preserve

Data might be A Valuable Commodity, But It’s Remarkably Easy To Lose Or For Others To Get Their Hands On. Mike Bedford Provides Guidance On How To Preserve, Recover And Destroy Data, And Looks At The Technologies Involved

If you were to carry out a survey, there’s little doubt that gold would be high up on the list of the commodities that are considered the most valuable. Yet other chemical elements, including several that are used in manufacturing electronic devices, are much more costly, while for those in famine-torn areas, the basic requirements of life, such as water and rice, would surely be the most important.

Interestingly, one commodity is rarely thought about in this context, yet it’s vital to the way of life we enjoy in the 21st century. According to the rhetoric, we live in an information age, and much of business is increasingly engaged in the digital economy, so there’s surely a strong case to suggest that data is the gold of the third millennium. And this isn’t true only of business. Each of us relies on data, yet commonly, we don’t take care of that data with the same care and attention as we do with our more conventionally valuable possessions.

Here we consider several aspects of looking after our data, but our aim isn’t to delve into internet security. While we certainly can’t overstate the importance of adopting safe practices online, advice here isn’t in short supply. Instead, we’re delving into three areas that attract much less attention, but are equally important. First, we look at how to preserve your data – that is, how to handle it so it will still be available to you in the future, whether that’s a month down the line, a year, or several decades. Second, if things do go wrong and you lose your data, most commonly by accidental deletion or a disk crash, we investigate methods of getting it back. And third, because it can be detrimental if data falls into the wrong hands, we delve into methods of secure deletion that you should use, for example, before disposing of an old PC.

PRESERVING DATA