One of the strongest divisions of KDMI is our Data Recovery division, which is absolutely ridiculous in this day and age for most home and small business computer operators.

For those like me with short attention spans I'll jump to the punch line quick - There are two simple to set up things you can do to have your data secure.

1. Use a quality Anti-Virus protection program  - I recommend ESET Nod32 (I'll get into why later)
2. Backup your data - I recommend Carbonite online backups (I'll get into why right away)

Do these two things from the get go and your system will run smooth and your data will be secure. At this point you need only read further if you are interested in why I recommend these solutions.

When it comes to protecting your data there are a number of different solutions ranging from multi drive raid arrays, backing up to external media such as DVD's or External Hard Drives, all the way to Online Backups to remote servers.

There are pro's and con's to every option, our reason for recommending the online backups with Carbonite comes down to ease of use, ease of recovery and cost.

The number one area in which we've seen data backup systems fail has been involves user error including failing to backup specific data, overwriting or deleting backup data, or failing to follow through with performing the backups on schedule (forgetting to do it).  The biggest reason being the failure to manually backup the data.

Carbonite removes this issue, it monitors changes to files in real time and backs them up as needed without interaction on your part, on install it's default setting will suffice for most, to monitor an additional folder outside of the default monitoring simply right click the folder and add it to Carbonite.

The amount of data you can back up is limitless, the initial backup can take a day or two due to slower upload speeds but after that the real time monitoring keeps up quickly. The only limitation is too those such as professional photographers who can create very large quantities of data quickly (I sometimes will add 6-8GB of images daily), for user like this I recommend a professional consultation for securing your data.

The cost of Carbonite is very cheap at $54 USD annually, this versus data recovery that can range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars to get your data back.

Anti-Virus

I'm a believer in you get what you pay for in this arena - not to say the most expensive is best, rather that free may have unwanted costs down the road, and I know at this point there will be those proponents of free solutions such as AVG that want to cry out and debate this, based on my professional experience recovering systems running these solutions I would never rely on any of the free offerings that I've encountered.

Now when we look at the quality solutions out there, there are a number of popular well known brands that hold massive market share and offer very good protection, there are a number of smaller players that offer good to excellent protection, but protection is not the only metric we measure Anti-Virus by, we need to also look at it's impact on our computer systems performance and this is where ESET Nod32 beats the others hands down.

ESET Nod32 in a number of the independent comparisons we've read usually beats the likes of Norton, McAffee, Kaspersky, AVG and others in Virus Detection and Cleaning, and beats them in keeping it's use of system resources low. This is all and great, but in real world terms does this matter? The simple answer is yes.

Here's a real world example; I received a call regarding a system that was performing slow and the caller figured there must be a virus despite running Norton 360 and it not detecting it, I went out and performed some testing took a look at the running processes, determining the system was clean of malicious software I discussed options with the user including the return on investment of upgrading the memory, replacing the system (client was already leaning this way), reloading windows, or uninstalling their newly purchased Norton 360 and installing the ESET Smart Security Suite (NOD32 plus additional features), with my recommendation that we do the latter using the free 30 day trial from ESET so that they weren't paying anything other than my time to try a solution that could result in significant savings. A year later the client has renewed their ESET license and continues to use the computer happily that they were at one time thinking that they would need to replace.

Back to the original point of this blog entry - data recovery is a strong aspect of my business, but it is truly unneccesary for those who follow the two things I just told you to do - use a good Antivirus solution (ESET NOD32) and use an automated backup solution (Carbonite) or for those with very large quantities of data call Kinash Digital Media Inc. for a backup consultation.