According to a 2010 poll by Symantec Corp. 79% of respondents said that data recovery and data backup were somewhat/absolutely important as initiatives. One has to wonder what the other 21% are thinking. Data is one thing that is uniformly important to all sizes of companies; anyone who loses data can go out of business if they suffer a catastrophe that interrupts cash flow. Individuals can lose accounting records and private projects representing many hours of work. There was a case of a man writing a novel who was limited in his knowledge of computers since in his day job he only brought up files and made some notes after sales calls.

His home computer was failing so he brought what he had of the manuscript to the office on a CD and put it on a Word document so he could stay late and type new work into the novel. Since the manuscript was changing every day he threw away the CD and kept writing, saving that day's version with a date and deleting the last file so he wouldn't get confused. The office network he was using automatically wiped out all deleted files; there was no desktop trash bin. Weeks later he had completed about 40% of the manuscript, got mixed up and deleted the only file with the manuscript on it because he forgot to save it under a new date. When he went to open the most recent file it wasn't there. All the inspired writing couldn't possibly be done from memory and a panic set in that the work was lost forever.

The would-be author approached an IT friend in the office who spent a little time and found an earlier version of the Word doc in a temporary file…the file had the important first chapters and only a section would need to be re-written. This was a case of pure human error. The project was saved but the nervous breakdown at the thought of losing everything had left a healthy appreciation for backing up data carefully. To quote Joni Mitchell, "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone".

A file recovery is possible on deleted files if you do it in time with data recovery software. The data isn't overwritten right away, the reference to it just disappears from the directory but it is not physically removed from the disk. The disk knows that the space is available so the data has to be retrieved before in gets overwritten so the computer shouldn't be used in the meantime.

Small and medium sized companies have limited budgets for backup systems; the less you can afford for backup systems the more reliance there is on humans to carry out backup procedures. Forgetting to do a backup for any length of time can leave a company vulnerable, especially if another problem comes up in the meantime. Not everyone is set up with arrays or cloud computing for more reliable data backup. They may face emergency expense if hard drive data recovery services are needed.

For smaller budgets the solution can be found using off-site backup, known as remote backup, which is completely automated and eliminates the possibility of human error. The data is replicated between two data centers so it will always be available. Companies can get this for a low monthly rate, giving them access to an enterprise class data backup solution.