Making simple copies of your data is one way to help protect your data from loss. Some people have become used to carrying their data from office to home and back on removable media. The mistake in this case would be to assume you data is safe simply because it is with you. If you're in this habit, modify it by copying your data on the removable media to one or more of your hard drives on a periodic basis. Better yet, install a tape backup in one of your machines and store the tapes at the other location.
Data copies can be a problem when the size of your data won't fit conveniently on a removable media without compression. Tape and other backup software will allow you to compress your data in a backup file that can be restored in the event of a drive failure.
Any backup is better than none.
You can backup your data to tape, diskettes, Zip drives, another hard drive, to a CD, to another machine on your network, and you can even backup your files to a server on the Internet. No matter what choice you make, any backup is better than none at all.
Virus Arrested, Files Recovered: Frequently, data loss can be due to a virus attack. In one such case, data recovery was accomplished on a drive that had been attacked by a virus that methodically erased files then in its final act of vandalism, it deleted the partition information from the drive. When the machine was rebooted, the drive was recognized, but no drive letter was assigned. The owner ran an "fdisk" to learn that no partition existed on the drive. A friend then suggested the data recovery services of Internet Desk, Inc. Fourty-eight hours later the machine was back in running order with all but 13 of some 65,000 files recovered.
