With Halloween just around the corner, we thought it was time for scariest type of surprise there is… data loss horror stories! We asked around the internet, in forums and on social media, for your worst data losses. Here’s what we found. Lock your doors and read on…
Enough to make a grown man cry…
We all know that data losses can have just a particularly devastating effect on businesses as the amount of data involved is often much larger than with individuals’ data losses. For small, local businesses, a huge data loss can even threaten their entire business’ survival.
“Data loss was responsible for the first time I saw a grown man cry,” Twitter user Jon told us. “I was a service engineer and had to tell a small business owner that his hard drive was dead.
“He lost all his accounts data going back forever.”
Stubbornness can be costly for business – very, very costly
“I’ve seen a business owner refuse to spend any money at all on a backup solution and lose 10+ years of data,” an IT professional and tech forum moderator told us. “And I see at least one post like that a week, if not more.”
Another user on a tech forum described a ‘sphincter-tightening experience’ in which he thought he had lost years’ worth of a client’s sales data after a computer malfunction. Luckily he had a backup, and was able to restore almost all of the data, only having to manually re-enter the last few months’ worth.
Many businesses have commercially sensitive data, such as information about their customers, products, or processes, that if lost and not backed up could have devastating effects for both company and customer. A significant data loss can set a business back by several years in its development.
But it can be just as devastating for personal data
“I had a 1TB external hard drive full of all my photos and other irreplaceable stuff and it got corrupted,” a Reddit user confessed to us. “I couldn’t recover everything so I lost all of my files.”
Your personal data can contain priceless memories that don’t exist anywhere else – meaning that without a backup, once they’re gone they’re gone forever. Is it worth taking that risk?
So, what can we learn from these horror stories? One thing is clear: ensuring you have a reliable backup of your data is absolutely essential in order to avoid risking your business’ survival or your school project. No wonder that, according to a recent survey by Advanced, a software company, four out of five business owners are considering using cloud backup data storage.
Make sure you don’t join the list of victims this Halloween…get in touch today to get your data safely backed up.
