A study concluded more than half of small businesses that suffer a major data loss don't survive very long. Be sure to keep up with your backups. It will save you clients, time, money, and quite possibly your business.

A client (photographer) asked me to try to recover photos from a corrupt 250GB hard drive. The client noticed the computers seemed to be running slow all of a sudden. An hour later they could no longer access the drive.

The drive was about half full so there thousands of photographs. Backups exist on CD's but backups are really intended to be a last resort since people don't manually verify each and every file after it's written to CD or DVD. While the client recovered the most recent projects to another hard disk, I focused on recovering the photos off of the malfunctioning drive.

I took a few photographs to help you visualize what good data looks like and what bad data looks like to the computer. Remember, computers only understand 1's and 0's. In the photos below, the white dots represent data on the drive. The top of the graph represents a 1 and the bottom represents a 0. When the computer encounters something other than a definite 1 or definite 0 it will take a guess. If you're lucky it will be a good guess, but it may not tell you there was a problem.

Example of good data...
 

Example of bad data...
 

A study concluded more than half of small businesses that suffer a major data loss don't survive very long. Be sure to keep up with your backups. It will save you clients, time, money, and quite possibly your business.