What’s The Most Common Cause Of Data Loss ?

Homer Simpson "Doh!"Ask anyone what they believe the most common cause of data loss is and they’ll most likely say something like a crashed hard drive or a broken computer. But, they’d both be wrong. The most common cause of data loss is human error.

Think about it, humans are fallible a make mistakes everyday (except me of course, I’m just perfect). This morning for example it’s taken me three attempts to create an image in Photoshop and upload it to my blog’s media gallery… 3 attempts! – How? Firstly I saved my image to the wrong directory so couldn’t find it to upload, next I saved it as a PST instead of a JPG – also to the wrong directory, so not only could I not find it, a *.JPG search didn’t show it up either. Finally I got it right, but it had been a frustrating 5 minutes.

What does all this matter in the great scheme of things? Nothing of course, it’s just part of day to day life – just like data loss. So, how easy is it to loose data? Very easy – far easier than you think. The most common type of data loss is accidental file and folder deletion – this is easily done – and one of the best inventions ever is the recycle bin – I’ll wager anyone who uses a computer regularly that they have been into the Recycle Bin at least once in the last six months!

Sometimes the Recycle Bin is not there as a safety net and then we can be in real trouble, there’s a whole web site about data loss here. I didn’t know it but it’s not just hard disks people lose data from, it’s easily deleted from tape too and (according to the web site) tape is far more difficult to recover data from as it’s now going out of date and not may people support it anymore. I guess it’s the way of things. Personally I’m very nervous about the cloud – it’s pretty unsafe if you ask me and easily hackable, so I prefer to keep my data on my hard drive. Anyway, back to work, now where did that file go??