First off, it’s important to note that data recovery isn’t cheap as far as services go. Certainly, it’s not incredibly expensive, and is often a lot cheaper than a visit to your local mechanic, but data recovery costs do add up. If you have $100 to your name, and a brutal hard drive crash, well, you’re not going to get much. Now, for a personal drive with not a lot of critical data on it, you may just skip out on data recovery and instead just buy a new drive, and start again. Easy.
However, it always shocks us here at HDRG that some business owners and managers simply agonize on every single dollar when determining whether data recovery is worth the expense. Let’s take a look at the value of data and how much it would cost to replace it for businesses that forget that dollars aren’t the only measurable asset in their organization.
Critical Business Data
Facts can be found in your company’s data. Customer information, sales records, accounting, and other hard data that you use to make money are all examples of super important business data. Furthermore, it’s data that you could probably re-enter from hard copies if you wanted to bring in a large number of temporary workers to perform data entry for a few days. In fact, if the data is a couple of years old, there may not even be a pressing need to enter it all, but doing so is the only way to ensure easy analysis and accessibility for long term reports and data measurement. Super thrifty business owners may just shrug off the loss and operate understanding that their business analysis is going to be somewhat handicapped. Of course on the other hand, you could bring in the dead drive or drives and have the data recovered and returned to you in a couple of days by Hard Drive Recovery Group. It really is easier than it sounds!
Subjective Data – Can You Live Without It?
That article for a professional magazine that was almost finished is an example of subjective data. Isn’t it possible to simply rewrite it? Sure, why not. The 15 hours you spent researching it and painstakingly writing it will definitely be cut to 10 or less this time, particularly if you saved notes. Lost your notes? Er, uh. Not good.
A subjective piece of information could also be the current state of the company speech that you spent three weeks preparing for the upcoming board meeting next week, for instance. That’s something else you could probably rewrite. How about a dozen or so customized proposals for some high-end clients? The ideas that you have been jotting down so that you don’t forget them have grown into a long list of ideas. A digital list that is on your crashed hard drive. Alternatively, how about some computer-generated sketches and designs for a marketing campaign? You might recall some of it, but it won’t have the same passion that it did when you first created it, which is a sad fact of life. Take a step back and you will likely determine that a $700 data recovery price is not going to kill you, and will save you time as well as the brutally unnecessary time to rewrite all of this stuff!
Proprietary Or Complex Data
For example, detailed schematics and drawings for a solar panel system would be considered complex data to store. It’s possible that it’s the first line of code for new software that will run on your assembly line. It’s possible that this is the final set of equations for a nuclear reactor. Unfortunately, you are unable to make it work at this time. Perhaps you could go back in time and save your hard drive from crashing before it happened. When it comes to complex data, it is nearly impossible to recreate it, and you should act accordingly.
Data Recovery Costs – Not So Bad When You Think About It
All of the previous ideas should lead you to a ridiculously obvious conclusion. Just from the standpoint of cost, what data should you have Hard Drive Recovery Group recover for you is a good question. The answer, of course, is everything, with the exception of the information you absolutely do not want to see again. If your company’s data recovery strategy is to call Hard Drive Recovery Group for any failed hard drive containing corporate data, unless the data on that particular hard drive was limited to the receptionist’s celebrity photo collection, you should be fine.
Believe us, we’re known for our low data recovery costs. Call us and see.