Just imagine this scenario. You own a highly profitable specialty retail store that stock thousands of parts. These parts are procured from the best sources that you have identified over many years, based on product quality, timely deliveries, reasonable prices and customer support.

The impact of a data loss on a business can be visualized if you consider a manufacturing operation with over a thousand employees, whose pay details are kept in the companys computer system.

Computer data is typically stored in magnetic form on Hard Disks, Magnetic Tapes, Compact Discs, DVD and RAID. Data on these storage media could become inaccessible owing to physical damage or corruption of the logical file system.

Malicious Programs The cyber world out there is fraught with malicious programs, ready to sabotage your computer systems, once they get an opportunity to do so. Imagine a situation in which your computer suffers a virus attack, resulting in the loss of all the precious data, meticulously collected and saved over a long period of time.

Statistics indicate that in the UK, 70% of the companies which suffered from data loss on a large scale, closed down within 18 months of the incident (Source: The UK department of trade and industry). Nowadays, all the companies maintain their data electronically and these data are invaluable to their business. No matter what precaution they take, companies cannot completely eliminate the danger of data loss. The data might be lost permanently sometimes. However, most of them times it can be recovered but the process might consume time and cost you considerable amount of money.

Floppy disks were introduced by IBM in the early 1970s. These were 8 inches in diameter and could store an impressive 100KB of data.

Portable hard disks are variants of the regular hard disk drives that are embedded in your computers. The only difference is that they come enclosed in a metallic case which can be connected to your computer by a data cable employing USB technology.