Disasters and Data Recovery

Software failure is another important reason for data loss under any circumstance. Natural disasters and disasters generated by humans come at the bottom of this list. But the problem with this particular category is that while the incidents are few, they are of devastating scale when they do strike. We are usually caught unprepared for anything of such massive proportions. The loss of life is terrible enough, but the aftermath has equally far-reaching consequences, as it involves the loss of livelihood for many people, and heavy damages for thousands of others who were not even physically present when the disaster struck.

Types of Disasters

The types of disasters that can cause data loss can be divided into three broad groups. This is being discussed in detail under the following:

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  Data Loss through Human Attacks: This includes wars, attacks, bomb blasts, and all other forms of physical attack by human beings. It must be noted here that virus attacks, that are logical by nature, are not counted within this category, but taken to be software flaws. The 9/11 blast, or the bomb attack on the Mumbai Stock Exchange in India are examples of such disasters.


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  Data Loss through Accidents: This includes shipwrecks, car crashes, plane crashes or any other form of accident on road, air, rail or sea. This does not include dropping your laptop or driving over it, or letting your USB drive plop into a bowl of soup while working on the dinner table. These come under the aforementioned category of human error. Therefore, the catastrophic nature of the data loss is most important here. The humans involved are only victims, and are not responsible for the data loss.


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  Data Loss through Natural Disasters: This includes hurricanes, floods, fire, storm, earthquake, landslide and other forms of disaster. Apart from claiming hundreds of life, disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the tsunami that struck South East India and the Pacific islands, also caused massive data loss. These are the worst cases of data loss and often impossible to recover. Fire damage is not recoverable if the temperature rises beyond the melting point of iron. Water is even worse for digital gadgets, since the debris left behind when the moisture eventually dries is a potential hard disk killer. Earthquakes bring the double threat of data loss through exposure to dust and through shock. A hard disk can absorb up to 300G of shock, but beyond that, the data will literally fly off the disk surface. Dust can settle in between the upraised portions and ‘crevasses’ on the surface of the boards and circuits, and if the dust gets to the surface of the hard disk, then the computer has very little hope. The major problem here is that the initial phase after a disaster is spent in trying to recover from the loss of lives and basic amenities, and data recovery attempts may not happen till very late. </li></ul>

How to Tackle Data Loss through Disasters

There are two ways to tackle data loss through disasters. As it must be evident, the majority of cases would involve physical loss of data, and logical data loss would happen only indirectly as a result of the physical disaster. Therefore, one should have some way of tackling disasters at the physical level, and also enough backup systems to take care of the situation in case all the data is anyhow lost or damaged.

It is strongly suggested that buildings in earthquake and hurricane-prone areas have a basement or bunker where the backup system may be housed. It is not much use if you keep the backup computer on the eleventh floor office, and it gets buried under the rubble with everything else when the building collapses.

In tsunami or flood-prone areas, it is important to have a backup in higher floors or buildings on stilts as many South East Asian coastal countries and islands are beginning to use now.

The best solution is to have an online or off-site backup. That way, the data is saved even when the physical location of the data is destroyed. This is the best method for both individuals and companies.  

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