The last minute goof-ups are common to everyone -- the student whose hard disk crashes on the eve of his thesis submission, the CEO whose presentation magically vaporizes from a laptop as he plugs it in (and there is a power surge), the marriage photos that get deleted by mistake while formatting a drive. While all of these situations look hopeless on the face of it, the fact is that they can often be prevented, or at least, the data can be saved.

Last year's data loss trends have been continuing this year too. Data loss is primarily caused by hardware failure all over the world. Just after it comes a new category called ?human error?, which had not been so important even five years ago. This encompasses all those peculiar ways in which data loss can be caused by us because we are inventive creatures. This category is followed by software-related losses and virus attacks. Finally, there is the chance of losing out on data through natural disasters, wars, terrorist attacks etc. Among all of these categories, data loss through human errors is clearly on the rise. The trend will only strengthen as the popularity of portable digital storage media increases. Since this is also one of the areas of data loss that is most easily controllable by us, we will be discussing this in detail below.

All desktops have a disk partition now, no matter what the size of the internal hard disk is. A lot of data is often lost when the Operating System of a computer crashes. In the case of laptops, there is the provision of maintaining a recovery disk which automatically saves the data as we work on it. When this disk nears its capacity, an alert is generated and we can take a backup of the recovery disk on an external disk such as a CD or even a USB drive at this point. In the case of desktops, there are certain data that is typically part of the OS and is on the same drive.

Once we know that these can disappear but are important, it would be wise to take a backup on the other drive, and not keep any other data on the drive containing the OS and other programme (exe) files.

The point made above leads to the importance of taking backups regularly. The domestic user can hardly be blamed for this when many companies in the UK still cut a sorry figure. Taking a backup is perfectly simple and cost-effective for home users, and is more a matter of habit than budget. CDs and DVDs are cheaper than paper notebooks now, and a USB drive is tailor-made for a laptop. For heavier data, a portable hard disk may be used.

Surveys reveal that more than 75% of home users in the UK are aware of the importance and uses of an antivirus software. However, the rates at which scans are run and the software is updated are quite poor. Installing the software is not enough. Make sure that the firewall is installed, filter options are running, pop-ups are blocked and the automatic update option is on. Viruses usually come in as attachments with spam mails. Do not open such fishy attachments even if they look really tempting (such as free offers, lottery winning announcements, adult sites, free downloads etc).

Files get fragmented and scattered if you are not careful how you save them. Save new copies under different names that are preferably short and do not contain internet links. Try to delete extra jpeg files wherever possible; they come in by truckloads while saving matter from the net, and create a lot of trouble by fragmenting files and getting corrupt as you work offline.

For very important data, it can be back to good old paper again. Take printouts of all such data apart from having a soft copy outside the hard disk.