If you need to ask yourself this question, then you must be one of the lucky few who have never experienced data loss. Unfortunately, most of us have been through these hard times more than once.
Imagine spending an entire day typing a document – and then there is a sudden reset, followed by an "oh no!"
from you. Another common scenario might be when you bring the final version of a project to your manager on a floppy disk (worst case scenario: the file exists only
on that
floppy disk) and it just won't open when the crucial moment comes. These things have a tendency to make you feel incredibly lost and helpless.
The goal of this document is to help you avoid these nightmare situations, and provide your business with a fail-safe data loss prevention mechanism that will not let you down.
It is beyond the scope of this tutorial to describe all possible accidents in detail and classify them by type, which is why only the basic cases of data loss will be covered.
While you are editing a document, the program crashes. When you open the file again, all the changes are lost. In the worst case scenario, you cannot open the document at all. There could be multiple reasons behind the crash, such as:
Usually hardware failure is more serious, and the chances of being able to recover data are much smaller. The problem is that unlike in the case of software failure, you can't actually access the data at all (think of a hard disk that doesn't turn on, or of a flash drive with a LED that doesn't blink anymore). Possible causes:
Even if hardware can be replaced or fixed, while software can be updated or reinstalled – one problem remains – the lost data cannot be automagically recovered. This leaves you with a single possible approach – data protection achieved via efficient preventive measures.
As a Private Disk user, you are exposed to the same risks, but due to the fact that strong encryption algorithms are used, additional problems can arise:
Conclusion – never forget your password, and make sure that the integrity of your encrypted data is preserved.
The best way to solve a problem is to avoid it. This section will list some data loss prevention steps. They have to be performed in order to minimize the chance of data loss and maximize the chance to recover data if things go wrong.
Private Disk has a feature that allows you to backup the encryption key. By using this option, you ensure that you won't have any problems caused by the inability to decrypt the image. Some of the problems that will be avoided are:
How to create a backup encryption key for your image:
1. Run Private Disk. 2. Switch to the Recovery tab. 3. Press Copy and choose your image file. 4. After entering your password, choose a file in which the backup will be stored and provide a password for the backup.
The technique described above is a huge step forward, but it cannot prevent the most serious problems that might occur. Among them are:
Regular data backup procedures will eliminate these risks. This process can be configured once and then automated, requiring little or no attention from you in the future. Moreover, you will not need any additional tools, as all the required mechanisms are either included in Windows, or are provided by Dekart for free. Basically, you have to make a copy of your image once a week, or once a month (depending on how often you update it), ensuring that it is physically located on a different storage device and that the copying was successful. By storing the image on a different device, you get reliability via redundancy. Understand that storing the image on the same hard disk will be useless if the hard disk is permanently damaged. In contrast, if you store your data on different media, or on another computer on the network, the chance of losing both copies of the image is extremely small. Checking the integrity of the backup copy is also crucial. Even if the data backup is on a different hard disk or computer, it becomes useless if it was altered in some way during the copy process. An efficient way of checking the integrity of a file is to compute its hash and compare it to the hash of the original. For this purpose, Dekart has developed a small data backup tool called HashCopy that can be used in conjunction with Windows' Task Scheduler. Below is a practical example:
Assume that your image is located here: c:\windows\sys.ext, you want to copy it at the end of each week to another computer's shared folder, available as I:\backup. Here is how HashCopy helps you do that:
1. Create bat file with the following contents:HashCopy.exe "c:/windows/sys.ext" "i:/backup/sys.ext" This will tell the utility to copy sys.ext to i:/backup/sys.ext. 2. Start the Control Panel and go to Scheduled Tasks. 3. Create a new task, choosing the bat file you have created at the first step. 4. Set the name of the task, and choose the additional parameters, such as the time and day of execution. You will also have to type in the password for your Windows user. 5. You can then edit the advanced settings.
If you did everything correctly, you will see the new task in the list. It will be executed at the specified time. From this moment on, if something happens to your data, you can always go to i:/backup and get an older version of the encrypted image. Of course, the latest changes will be lost, but you can still access all your precious files. You can get some extra-reliability by adding the /queue parameter when running HashCopy, ex: HashCopy.exe "c:/windows/sys.ext" "i:/backup/sys.ext" /queue In this case, the utility will keep two data backups, a current copy and an old one. Each time the scheduled task is executed, the old copy is deleted, current becomes old, and a new current backup is made from the original image. In other words, you will always have two backups at hand, being able to revert your data to the state they were in one week or two weeks ago (depending on the selected backup interval). Note: Double quotation marks are only necessary when you are dealing with paths that contain spaces, ex: C:/Program Files, but using them with simple paths is also possible. Therefore you can always use the double quotation marks and be sure that things will always work. Note: A slash '/' is used as a folder separator, not a backslash '\'. Note: If you are backing up your encrypted image at regular intervals, you have to keep in mind that enough free space is needed. If you use the /queue parameter, then you will need an amount of space that is twice as big the size of the image. Tip: Another username and password can be used. This is helpful for system administrators, they can backup other users' data without their having to interfere. Tip: You can minimize the loss of recent changes by backing up your data more often. Tip: HashCopy has other functions too. You can learn more about them by reading the included manual.
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