Mitigating Data Corruption

Aloha!

Have you ever had the unfortunate experience of being told by a computer tech, "Sorry, I can't recover your file. It's corrupted."? Or perhaps, worse, have you been notified during the computer's start up process of a corrupted file that prevented Windows from loading? If you have suffered neither calamity, lucky you! But read on - the longer you work with computers, the more likely you will get stung. And it won't be pleasant. It could occur at the absolute worst time. 

What is data corruption? How does it happen? How can you up the odds to prevent it? And how can you safeguard your data so if bad things happen, your pain will be minimal? 

Let me answer the last question first. To safeguard your important data, take a break from this blog and back up your data now. Don't proscratinate! Back it up to a flash drive, to an external hard drive, to CD or DVD, or to an online backup server. Then make a plan to do this regularly - as often as you create valuable data you can't live without, such as documents, photos, music, email, etc. If you don't know where to start, ask a friend, a colleague or a computer tech. Or do a web search. There are plenty of detailed articles on this topic as well as youtube videos. 

Why the urgency to back up? Well, presuming that the data you need to back up is in good shape (not corrupted), and the medium you are backing up to is healthy (so it won't corrupt the data you will store on it), having data backed up somewhere safe, secure, and accessible enables you to recover the good data should any of its counterpart if your computer go south. If the latter happens, you can restore the backed-up data and be back in business quickly. You're blood pressure will drop, and relieved you will be (as Yoda might put it.) 

Now, back to the "what is data corruption?" question. First, what is data? Simply put, computer data are 1's and 0's, binary electrical states, that are stored long-term on your computer's magnetic hard disk drive. Any document you are currently working on, that was, say, created yesterday and opened a few minutes ago, had been saved yesterday on your magnetic hard drive, and opened today from the same location on the hard drive. It now resides in electrically in RAM, the computer's temporary Random Access Memory. If you make further changes to this file, you must save it again to the hard drive or you will lose the changes. RAM is temporary storage.

Because data is electrical when in use, if you are working on your PC and the power goes out and you haven't saved the file you were working on, you will lose any changes. Your changes have effectively evaporated. What can also happen with a power outage is the entire file could be corrupted because a portion of it was loaded into RAM, and when the power went out, a critical portion of the file did not get recorded back to the hard drive. Without that portion, the entire file is not readable, which means it can't be opened.  

To mitigate data corruption in the above examples, first, save your document every few minutes. In some programs, you can select an auto-save feature to save automatically for you every 5 or 10 minutes, or whatever increment you deem necessary. Also, plug your PC into an Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) unit which provides constant power through a battery should you have a power outage in the room or building. If the power goes out while your computer is plugged into a UPS it will continue to run for several minutes, giving you time to save your work and shut down the computer until power is restored. Laptops run through a battery, so they are not a susceptible to power outage problems.

Data can also be damaged by a failing hard drive. Certain portions of the drive can begin to fail without reporting this. One day your computer may not even start. It's best to run regular hard drive tune-ups by using utility programs, such as the built-in checkdisk program in Windows, and by taking quick action to diagnose computer software glitches before they worsen to the point of a hard disk crash. I've done the postmortem on plenty of computer hard drives and data could be been preserved if the owners had responded to the warning signs earlier, such as the computer slowing down considerably when doing simple tasks.  

Some strains of malware are also designed to damage computer data, in some cases, wiping it out completely. So keep your Internet security program up to date and scan the entire computer at least weekly. 


To summarize, I have explained what data corruption is - data damaged by, for example, electrical events like a power failure, a failing hard drive, or by malware; I have suggested how to prevent data corruption - by using a UPS unit, running hard drive utility programs, running counter malware software, and acting quick when quickly when quirky things happen; and I have recommended that you safeguard data by backing up often. Very worst case, if you are pressed to get back to work and you have a good backup, you can load your backup data on another computer.

Last, I recommend you take some time to understand how your most prized programs use data - where it's stored, how you can access it, how you can back it up, how you can restore it. The data used by Microsoft Outlook, for example, is much trickier to work with than the data stored by Microsoft Word. Get some tutoring on this if needed. It will save you much grief in the future.   


Wishing you akamai computing!