There isn't even a trace of anything, either with you or the concerned agency. Your existence on planet Earth is going to be one long miserable sequence (You could turn into a zombie, like in the movies), unless you can rectify the situation overnight. Your business entity is no different. But scientific surveys have shown that businesses which do not recover the major portion of their lost data, do not survive beyond 5 years.

Loss of precious data, irrespective of the owner of the data, is one of the most effective ways of crippling any business, organization or individual, for a long long time (you could call it slow-sure-business poisoning). Data, permanently lost is an irreparable loss. The thought of losing data, even on a temporary basis, is the stuff that businesses have nightmares about.

Can you afford a loss of data, albeit temporarily? Look at the obvious cost. The cost of data loss is estimated at more than $ 5 billion annually, in the U.S alone. (That figure was compiled from those who truthfully admitted that they had lost data! What about the rest of the world and the remaining lot of people who lost data, but won't acknowledge it or do not know that they have lost their data in the first place?

Entire countries do not even have that kind of annual revenue. You could feed, clothe and provide shelter to a large segment of the worlds downtrodden, with that kind of money. All this money is trickling steadily into the drain, year after year, because someone somewhere just did not adhere to set instructions or did not take the necessary precautions to secure the valuable data. That's a huge monetary loss for society as a whole. Of course, you could compensate some of that loss, by providing more employment to an army of data entry specialists, deployed to re-enter or retype the lost data, at rates ranging from $130 per hour to $340 per hour.

To put it more precisely, the required time and attention were not allocated to protect the sensitive data. So if you were to correlate this monetary cost of data loss (in terms of man hours lost), that would be tantamount to a few million hours wasted. It does not make the least business sense to let your precious human resource twiddle their thumbs and sit around, waiting for the data to be magically restored. If your active data disappears down a bottomless trench, your workforce is sure to idle on the bench. Many idle minds on the bench could mean serious rifts within your office and breakdown of office atmosphere, before long. This could be your worst case scenario, in-house, if a major data loss occurs and persists in remaining that way.

But what happens when your statutory data is lost. You are in deep trouble with the various Governmental agencies. Convincing dyed-in-the-wool bureaucracy about the genuineness of your data loss, the absence of reliable backup etc. is an uphill task. Then after a lot of effort, just when you have managed to stabilise the situation in respect of the governmental agencies, where are your customers? Slowly drifting away to your competitors or other alternatives, the dwindling numbers of your customer base undoes all that painstaking effort put into the building up of your sales, over the years. A lawsuit from a disgruntled customer is also a blow below the belt. You can only try to stem the damage first until the time you begin to reverse the damage. So getting back your data can put your business back on its feet?

With the level of technology available today, there is no guarantee that you will get your data back completely (the quantum and the exact form of your original data) and that too, with a snap of your fingers. Forget the magic wand. There's no such thing. You will have to patiently work your way back: try to locate the missing data yourself and restore it, call in the experts and pay through your nose to set it right; patiently put up with the loss of your projects, watch your customers slowly disappear, humour the remaining employees left behind in the debris of the data loss storm etc or take the easy way out: pull the shutters down and flee.