Preventing Data Loss

Keeping an eye on the health of your system is important to prevent failures and loss of data.

Many forms of data loss are preventable with regular system health checks and backups.

I recently noticed some performance issues and stuttering on my desktop. As a part of the troubleshooting, I used a program called Crystal Disk Info to view the health of the disk. This handy program can show you the features a disk has, the age of the disk, how many hours has been in use for, the general health of a disk and if it’s a good idea to replace the disk in question.

This scan has shown that the disk has over 400 bad sectors which indicate that data loss is a possibility. Fortunately, I have captured the problem early, and data loss seems to only be within the Steam game library which is easy to restore by re-downloading off the internet.

My backup method is what’s called a hybrid cloud strategy. My devices are set to back up to my NAS (Network Attached Storage) which is backed up to a cloud backup service, in this case, One Drive since I get 1TB of space free with an office 365 subscription. The NAS is also backed up to a local external USB Hard Disk so that I have the speed of local drives for recovery with the security of cloud if something serious such as a lightning strike or robbery happens.

What is your backup strategy? It could be as simple as a USB hard drive and Windows File History or as complex as a hybrid local cloud backup solution. If you need help installing the right backup solution for your needs, please contact us at Small Space IT today.