Accidental Data Deletion – Anyone Can Do It

Posted by admin on Mar 24, 2011 in Blog | 1 comment

You must backup your data routinely otherwise you will pay the price. This is a problem that could have been effortlessly rectified had an online data backup service been in place or ultimately, a hosted Microsoft Exchange service.

I received an urgent telephone call from a client today. She had inadvertently deleted a folder within her outlook PST file. The folder in question was an extremely important folder with all correspondence associated with a specific email account. This email account is the principal account for an additional company this particular client takes care of. This resulted in almost all the email associated with this business being totally lost, as the folder was also accidentally removed from the deleted items folder too.

Pursuing our preliminary analysis, we found that the email data backup process has not been executed in quite some time. The backup operation was taking a long time to complete, so the client hadn’t actually ran the process for many months. Approximately 8Gb of email data in 2 PST files, together with numerous other folders of user data.

Numerous retrieval attempts were carried out using multiple methods of recovery over a period of several hours. Yet none of the lost email was able to be reclaimed. This was quite a pricey exercise for the client. This particular client lost one or two hours out of her hectic schedule attempting to find the data herself as well as a further couple of hours loss in productivity while our staff attempted to recover the data while using her laptop. After this, more data recovery attempts were carried out offsite in order that the client could get back onto their system and get back to work. All efforts at recovering this data failed. Pursuing the recovery process the client will get a bill for over $300 for the attempted retrieval of the unintentionally deleted email folder.

Had this client decided, some months before to employ a Hosted Microsoft Exchange service or an online data backup service, this entire scenario could have been resolved with a basic data restoration. Both of these solutions would have protected the valuable email data as a result of automated backups of the data. The money spent on the attempted recovery of the data could have paid for almost an entire year’s subscription to either an online backup service or a hosted Microsoft Exchange service. Not to mention the lost productivity and the fact that this business critical data was lost forever.

It is extremely simple and cost effective to use cloud computing services, such as online backup services and hosted Microsoft Exchange services. Cloud services such as these, can save you time and money and will also value add your existing IT systems without the need for additional hardware or software purchases.