Backups - Onsite and Offsite

Adder Consulting offers both onsite and offsite backup solutions. Every company is different and everyone has a vastly different amount of data that they need to back up. Needless to say, this calls for a wide range of solutions, and Adder Consulting is an expert at selecting the best solution and backup products for your business.

The risk of hardware failure is the most commonly talked-about reason to perform backups. Indeed, nothing will jolt someone into realizing the importance of backups more than an unrecoverable hard disk failure. Since the hard disk stores your main programs and data, it is the hardware whose failure hurts the most. It is also what gets the most attention, and rightly so.

However, there are other hardware problems that can cause permanent data loss, and some of these can be rather hard to figure out, since they don't seem like they should be responsible for the problem. Below is a list of some situations that can cause permanent loss of data in the form of corrupt files:

Power outages
Losing power at the wrong time, such as when you are doing sensitive work on your hard drive, can easily result in the loss of many files.

RAM memory errors
With so many systems today running without error detection or correction on their systems memory, there is the potential of a memory error corrupting the data on the hard disk. While it is uncommon, it does happen.

Resource Conflicts
Conflicts resulting from peripherals (like printers scanners sound cards etc) that try to use the same interrupt requests (IRQ), DMA (Direct Memory Access) channels or I/O addresses, can cause data to become corrupted.

Time is a factor because all devices with moving parts have a lifespan like all things do, so one has to expect that sooner or later the device will wear through, which is why a backup and maintenance strategy is so important with computers.