Best Practises for Companies Managing Increased Data

19 April 2011

As Information Technology has found application in almost all aspects of our lives—personal, corporate, public and private sectors alike—there is inevitably a deluge of data. According to IBM, the global volume of data doubles every two years.

The reasons for this exponential growth of data are numerous. For instance, companies nowadays go into all sorts of business analytics in order to understand the psyche of their consumers and of their competitors. This intense research necessitates larger storage and handling of massive amounts of historical data.

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Successful Data Erasure

18 April 2011

There may be an occasion when you need to thoroughly wipe out all data from your hard drive. Your hard drive may have been corrupted and you need to clean it before reinstallation. You may have secret, confidential or valuable company information in your computer which must never be discovered by anybody. You may be submitting it for repair and want to make sure nobody can access the data stored in your drive. Or more commonly, you may want to donate, sell or dispose of your hard drive but are afraid that somebody might steal data from it.

It is now fairly common knowledge that hitting that delete button ironically does not permanently delete data, neither does simply emptying the Recycle Bin. The fact is that digital information is still retained on your hard drive and can be extracted using software.

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How to Safely Dispose of Your Old Hard Drive

14 April 2011

When an old hard drive gets too old, small capacity or faulty to be of use, people often simply throw them away like ordinary rubbish. Today, however identity thieves and hackers can take that tatty old hard drive and turn it into a treasure trove which they can use to steal your credit card number, bank records, passwords and other personal information. This is one of the easiest and simplest methods of identity theft and it is so easily avoidable.

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Common Hard Disk Drive Problems - Bad Sectors

11 April 2011

A bad sector is a term used to refer to a computer problem where data cannot be written onto a sector of the disk, cannot be accessed by the operating system or just cannot be used due to permanent damage. A sector is a segment or subdivision of a track on a magnetic or optical disk.

Bad sectors are generally detected by disk utility software such CHKDSK, SCANDISK and badblock. When these bad sectors are detected by utility software, they are blocked from usage and the operating system “skips” on them.

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