Preventing data destruction is always a challenge. Taking steps and developing strategies can effectively prevent the loss of your valuable data be it personal of business. Losing precious data can wreak havoc with your personal life and may have a damaging effect on your business or your job.
- One strategy to employ to prevent data destruction is to make certain that you back everything up. Regardless of the program and regardless of where you are storing your data, always back it up so that your data is not stored on the computer’s hard drive or on a company server. Quite often people, and businesses, will store their important data on separate portable drives and secure them off site or even in a fire proof safe.
- The worst place to store anything is on the same drive that you are using and where your overall operating system is located. Just sticking a document in your “my documents” folder can easily lead to loss, theft, and accidental data destruction. One simple strategy to avoid having dozens of little USB drives to keep track of is to simply attach an additional hard drive to your computer and store everything there. It will cost you little but can provide you peace of mind with regard to potential data destruction. Even if your system crashes, or becomes infected with a virus, you can rest assured that your data is safe on the second hard drive.
- Perhaps the easiest way to guarantee data destruction or loss is to open email attachments from unknown sources. Quite often, these attachments will contain a virus or some other manner of malware and may even cause you system to crash. It may become impossible to retrieve your data once you have let loose a virus or piece of malware.
- The most important safeguard against data destruction ultimately comes down to you. You are the one who can prevent it by taking certain steps and employing certain strategies that will prevent any user errors on your part. Hitting the wrong key accidentally has made more data disappear that pretty much anything else. Though it may seem obvious, one of the best ways to protect your data is having back up hard copies of everything you do. These, too, can be stored off site if necessary.
There will be times, however, when you, or your company, will need secure data destruction services. Sensitive personal and company information can easily be destroyed so that outdated yet highly sensitive information will not fall into the wrong hands.