Living in the United Kingdom has one major downside which became apparent in the last years. The government likes to collect all sorts of data about their citizens but seems incapable of securing that data. Laptops, USB sticks and other data sources get lost regularly and reveal important information about British citizens to its finders.
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Another USB Stick With Important Data Lost In The UK
Check Media Integrity
Nothing is more frustrating than to realize that some files of a backup are corrupted. This happens of course right at the time when you need the backup. One way to prevent this scenario from happening would be to use different locations for your backups, for example CDs, external hard drives and USB drives. Even though you store the backup in different places it is not guaranteed that the files on those devices are not corrupted. The probability that it will happen is simply reduced.
Check your Hard Drives with HDD Health
Hard drives are critical components in every personal computer. They store the data that you are working with and a failure or defect could lead to data loss sometimes without the possibility of recovering the data. Backups are of course a good idea but monitoring the hard drives performance is another method to check if it is likely that your hard drives might be at the end of their life cycle.
Automatically back up your hard drive
It´s always a good idea to backup your hard drive(s) every now and then to prevent data loss. The guys, eh Gina, over at lifehacker wrote a nice article. It only describes the procedure for windows computers, all you need is an external hard drive, a ftp server and the freeware tool Syncback.
Prevent data loss of Cd´s and Dvd´s
Cd´s and Dvd´s have the nasty habit to become unreadable due to data loss or aging at the very moment when one needs them most. Dvdisaster creates error correction codes to compensate read errors which are not correctable in the CD/DVD drive.
