Hurricane Hacks For Protecting Data

By Steve Jurczak, Carbonite

The convenience of data is also its greatest weakness. All it takes is a major storm – or something far more mundane – to lose access to data. Since there are a number of causes of data loss, it’s important to prepare for all of them. But it’s hard to prepare when you don’t know what to expect. We talked with Carbonite VP of Product Management Jamie Zajac about how to anticipate the types of disasters that catch a lot of people and businesses off guard.

Get woke to data loss

When most people think of data loss, they think major disasters, like headline-generating storms and floods. Of course, it’s important to anticipate highly impactful outages. But these are far more rare than other causes of data loss. “It’s everyday scenarios that are really common. Like leaving a laptop on an airplane, dropping a phone in the river, or accidentally deleting a folder and having the recycle bin policies expire,” Zajac says. 

Another cause of data loss is hardware failure. “Hardware has become more reliable,” Zajac says, “but you never know when a hard drive will fail, a computer will be dropped or a motherboard will crash.”