Recovering from a natural disaster can be extremely difficult on all fronts - both on the physical and emotional side. What can be even more difficult, however, for most businesses, is a data disaster.

It is likely that you have prepared your business for disasters of all kinds. You have emergency kits to sustain the people inside of you need to shelter in place, you've practiced fire drills, you have insurance for flooding. but what happens if it is your infrastructure that is struck by the disaster?

There are many things that can trigger an infrastructure disaster, including things that you cannot predict. Things that can bring your data center to a halt. How can you protect yourself?

One of the best ways to keep yourself, your business, your reputation, and your data safe is to incorporate a disaster recovery plan (DRP) that has backup and redundancy built into it.

In fact, it is so important to so many businesses that the United States Government actually recommends creating a DRP plan: " An information technology disaster recovery plan (IT DRP) should be developed in conjunction with the business continuity plan. Priorities and recovery time objectives for information technology should be developed during the business impact analysis. Technology recovery strategies should be developed to restore hardware, applications and data in time to meet the needs of the business recovery. "

Here's what we classify a strong DRP:

Create A Sound Disaster Recovery Plan

Planning for a disaster might be difficult because you have to think about anything and everything that can go wrong AND THEN figure out how to tackle them. We suggest starting with the most basic (therefore, the most likely) situations and moving on from there.

You want to define what will keep your business running: emails, applications, computer equipment, and backups. You will need to determine how long you can go without other processes and create a chain of replenishment.

From there, you will be able to figure out who is responsible for declaring the disaster, how to keep your employees informed, and how you will communicate to your clients.

Carry Out The Plan

As soon as you have established a strong plan, you want to put all of the requisite steps into play and make sure that everything is implemented properly. Sometimes, you will have to anticipate new parts of the plan when you build new applications. It is always best for the project (in an agile sense) to build with the security team during your development phase.

You want to monitor your data recovery plan and update it if needed. Remember that you have to change it up and edit it as time goes by, which will result in fewer IT problems and less downtime if you do have a disaster.

Test Your Data Recovery Plan - Before A Disaster

If you take the time to write a data recovery plan, you may want to actually make sure it works. The sad truth is that not enough people do that. You are leaving yourself open for an even bigger disaster.

If you have a plan in place, test it. Simulate different circumstances a few times a year and see how your plan responds. You will be extremely thankful you that you did this when a real disaster does come.

Even better, you will be able to evaluate your plan and fix the areas where you spot weaknesses.

Back-Up Your Data And Store It For A Data Disaster

If there is a disaster, most people don't know that the data they store on site isn't completely safe, especially when a disaster occurs. That is why it is so important to store your backed up data offsite. Create a backup file of the data and transfer it (securely) to an offsite data storage center.

From there, keep backing up at least once a day.

Make Sure Employees Follow Suit

Many companies tell their employees to store data on the company's network and back it up - that doesn't mean that everyone does it. Some are too lazy and some just don't remember to do it.

Make sure that your employees have incentives to follow suit and, at least, back up desktops and laptops on site so that you can get it back in the case of a disaster or if the device gets damaged, stolen, or lost.

Regularly Update Your Virus Scanners

The security you use in your IT infrastructure is so important. You need to make sure that everything is protected against viruses, malware, and spyware. Protect your infrastructure as soon as you can and as regularly as you can by installing regular virus pattern updates as part of your data recovery plan.

This is one of the best steps you can take to stop a data disaster from occurring - and prevention is always the best policy.

No matter what, you need to remember that every single business out there, no matter how big or small it is or how much tech it really uses is vulnerable to experiencing a data related catastrophe. Arm yourself and your employees against disaster by working to put a disaster recovery plan into place. It will be one of the very best things you will ever have done for your company, even if you don't ever use it.

Our team takes pride in being the most experienced team of IT professionals in New Jersey. You can count on us to have solutions to problems that you may not have had luck with before. When it comes to data recovery in New Jersey, you simply cannot go to anyone better. We have technical support available to the public every day of the week: you’ll have the option to talk to an experienced technician if a problem arises.

Looking for the Best Computer Services in New Jersey? Call: (908) 332-5051

Data recovery is one of the scariest things you don't know about until it is too late. While most people don't keep all that much on their laptops, businesses and organizations have years and years of important information stored on something that could fail at any given time.

Sometimes, it doesn't even have to be a bunch of files - it can be one big file that was critical but it was deleted by mistake.

These things happen all the time and it can be quite frustrating to get your information back quickly, if you can get it back at all. However, data recovery is possible in some cases.

How much does data recovery cost?

There isn't really a "one size fits all" answer here and we can't even give you an estimate over the phone. The realities of data recovery are intricate and can require a bit of time before someone can even determine if they can help you.

As such, the cost of data recovery varies significantly. There are so many different types of hard disks, drives, USB drives, SD cards, and other storage options that require an IT professional to take their time when making an estimate or even providing an answer about if they can recover anything.

Is data recovery a lot of work?

Depending on the situation, data recovery can take quite a bit of work. Sometimes it can take just a few seconds. You are paying for the time, labor, and skills when you seek out someone to help with data recovery, so be sure to put everything into perspective.

Just like we can't tell you how much data recovery will cost, we also can't estimate how much work it will take without looking at your laptop or drive.

What is the data recovery process?

The process begins with an IT professional looking over your equipment to see if recovery is even possible. Once that is complete and you turn your device over to us, it can take a few business days to complete an evaluation and get it back to you. (If you have a flat rate IT plan with us, you will get it sooner.)

Once the data recovery specialists look at it and determine the next course of action, you should get a quote. We will tell you the cost and give you an estimate on the timeline.

Then, we get to work recovering what we can. We will work until we have exhausted all of our resources and recovered everything we could.

How long does it take to recover my data?

There is no set time, it can take a few minutes or a few weeks, depending on the level of complication. It can take as long as two weeks for certain companies, especially those that you have to mail your product to. Taking it to someone in your area will significantly cut back on the time you are away from your device.

Does the amount of data recovered change the price?

This is a common question and the answer is no - most often, the prices will be about the same because it requires the same amount of work.

Can I choose what data I get back?

Most customers probably don't need to get everything on their devices back - for example, those silly memes you saved probably don't mean as much to you as your family photos.

However, most data specialists won't pick and choose the data to recover, they will recover everything that they can. Still, it is important to mention what data is the most important to you so that we can define our goals and helps us target the most important stuff first. These drives can be delicate and working on them can degrade them - so sometimes we have to lose some data to save other data.

7. How do I get my data back?

Once you have paid for your services and we have discussed what was found, the data recovered will be placed on a new, healthy storage system and given back to you. In most cases, we cannot reload the data back onto the device that you gave us, mostly to protect you from having to go through the entire process all over again.

You can provide your own system for storage or we will include that in our price.

Once again, losing your data can be an absolute nightmare, especially for people who keep very important information on their computers. The best thing to do is plan ahead: have an IT company on retainer or as a monthly service so that you can get the help you need quickly.

At Dave’s Computers, our team of specialists has the skills and experience necessary to recover your personal data from all kinds of data storage devices. Not only that, but our recovery center is conveniently located in New Jersey so that you do not have to lose working time to shipping or travel.

We can recover deleted files from flash drives, thumb drives, external USB drives, hard drives/hard disks, RAID systems, and Apple / Mac devices. Regardless of the storage capacity, or the size of the device, you can depend on us to recover lost files and take care of your storage needs quickly and efficiently.

Our team takes pride in being the most experienced team of IT professionals in New Jersey. You can count on us to have solutions to problems that you may not have had luck with before. When it comes to data recovery in New Jersey, you simply cannot go to anyone better. We have technical support available to the public every day of the week: you’ll have the option to talk to an experienced technician if a problem arises.

Looking for the Best Computer Services in New Jersey? Call: (908) 332-5051

We talk a lot about backups here at Dave’s Computers in New Jersey. They are a cheap and easy way to keep your data safe and stops you needing our expert data recovery services. Rather than waiting for us to recover your data, you could do it yourself and be up and running again in no time.

Even if you’re making backups of your important data, I bet you’re making one of these three common mistakes.

Single backup

For business or critical personal data, a single backup just won’t cut it. It is a single point of failure and is almost as susceptible as your original data. To be truly effective, you need three copies of critical data. The original on your hard drive, a copy on a different medium and a copy either in the cloud or stored offsite.

Then, whatever happens, you have at least one copy of your data to work with. With cloud storage being so cheap, I tend to recommend a copy in the cloud and a copy on an external drive. Cheap, simple, secure.

Scheduling backups

Taking a single backup and then forgetting to do it again is another common mistake. That’s fine for static data that doesn’t change but not much good for data that is continually updated. If your data is updated frequently, you need to update your backup just as frequently.

For most businesses, a daily backup is sufficient. For home users, a weekly backup may work. Much depends on what you want to back up. As you can automate the entire process, it makes sense to do it as often as you need to.

Not verifying your backup

Creating backups is all very well but have you checked them? Have you made sure your files are accessible and that nothing is missing or corrupted? File copying is now very accurate but not infallible. Regularly testing your backups when any significant changes are made is essential. If you don’t check, you could be adding bad data to bad data and that isn’t good for anyone.

This may all sound like a lot of work for a simple data backup but it’s important if you value that data. We store more and more in digital format now so it pays to keep it all safe with backups and then to keep those backups safe.

If you have any questions about backups or data recovery, contact Dave’s Computers in New Jersey. We would be happy to help!

We use SD cards everywhere. In our phones, tablets, digital cameras, Raspberry Pi and other devices with expandable memory. They are cheap, easy to use and can be swapped out in seconds. But can you recover data from one if you accidentally delete or erase it?

Yes we can. This is another common issue we see here at Dave’s Computers in New Jersey. Our data recovery team often deal with photographers or others who use SD cards in their devices. The medium works differently to a hard drive but uses the same principles to store data. Therefore we can use similar principles to recover it.

SD card data

SD cards use a different file format than Windows or Mac but the same storage principles. The SD card is divided into sectors that are given an index reference. Data is stored within each sector and the index is updated with a code telling it what’s stored inside it. When you delete a file, it is the index that is wiped, not the actual data.

As long as you don’t overwrite the data, it is accessible and therefore recoverable.

The important thing there is not overwriting the data before we can get to it. It’s a common issue with data recovery. Storage can seemingly overwrite randomly. As the index of that memory sector is empty, the device thinks it is available to write new data. If you continue using the device, that data may become overwritten.

That’s why we always tell customers to stop using their device immediately they realize they have overwritten, deleted or otherwise lost their data. It is to prevent any of that data being overwritten. Once overwritten it is no longer recoverable.

SD card data recovery

We have some specialist tools here at Dave’s Computers that can retrieve data from SD cards. As long as the card itself has not been damaged and is otherwise working, we stand a very good chance of recovering any data not overwritten.

Our tools can identify existing data within sectors with no index and retrieve them ready for recovery. The process is the same for computers and while it takes a long time, it is very effective.

There are lots of programs on the market that offer to retrieve data from SD cards. Some of them work very well. I would say that if you’re confident in retrieving your data, you could use one. If you’re not confident in using them or you have data you really cannot lose, bring the card to us.

With all the talk around data security and encryption, an intriguing question has arisen around data recovery. If you have an encrypted drive that fails, does data recovery work? Can you recover files that have been encrypted by a third party program?

The short answer is yes we can. Dave’s Computers in New Jersey does this all the time. Whether you use Windows or Mac, are a home user or small business, encryption is an essential defense against data loss and theft. So what happens if your drive fails or you need data recovery?

Encryption and data recovery

The exact approach depends on what has happened and what caused the data loss in the first place. If the drive is physically damaged or the data has been rendered inaccessible by hardware failure, our options are limited. We may be able to repair the drive enough to copy the data but that will be it.

We have specific tools here at Dave’s that make a bit by bit copy of a hard drive. It’s called cloning and means taking an exact copy of every bit and byte stored on that drive. It’s very slow but is a very useful process for encrypted drives. The tool does not need to know what every bit and byte means, it just needs to copy the right 1s and 0s from the source drive and write them in exactly the same place on the new destination drive.

Using this kind of tool, it doesn’t matter whether you encrypted your drive using BitLocker, PGP, TrueCrypt or one of the many other drive encryption programs out there.

The other advantage is that even though we are copying your data, we cannot see it either!

This kind of tool is one of many options we have when dealing with encrypted drives. If you know your decryption key or took a copy of the certificate, we can often use that in our recovery. We can decrypt the files, copy them to another drive and let you encrypt them again once we’re finished.

Our approach to data recovery depends entire on the situation. We won’t know that until we get our hands on your device and begin our investigation. Once we know what we’re dealing with, we can offer specifics on what we can and what we cannot do.

We encourage everyone to use drive encryption to keep their data safe. We would also like to reassure everyone that even if you suffer data loss on an encrypted drive, there is a good chance we can recover it. Don’t let the risk of data loss prevent you securing that data while you have it!

New Jersey has a few reseller stores that offer to sell your devices on for cash. They either sell them in their own store or sell them on eBay or other outlet and offer cash on the day for your device. Some of these stores promise to securely wipe the device before selling it on, but are they? If they are wiping data, are they doing it properly?

Regular readers of the Dave’s Computers blog will know that we can recover data in all kinds of situations with the right tools and approach. Even when you think data has gone forever, our guys can work their magic and recover all, or a good portion your data within hours.

So would you trust your old phone or hard drive to a reseller you don’t know?

If you answered yes, you might like to read this report. It’s a study by Rapid7 that spent six months buying devices from reseller stores and testing them for accessible data. Of the 85 devices they bought, only 2 of them had been securely wiped before being sold on. That’s 2 out of 85 phones, laptops, tablets, desktops and hard drives.

The data recovered from these devices included:

• 611 email addresses
• 50 birthday dates
• 41 social security numbers
• 19 credit cards
• 6 licenses
• 2 passports
• Thousands of images and documents

This shows quite clearly that you should never trust anyone to look after your personal security and privacy aside from yourself.

Data recovery works both ways. It works in your favor when you lose something as we can recover it for you. That’s a good thing. It works against you if you don’t securely wipe your data before selling your device because if we can recover your data, so can someone else with the same expertise.

Securely wiping data is something we talk about a lot here at Dave’s Computers. Our data recovery team are well aware of this trend of passing on old devices with data still accessible on it. A simple disk format or delete just isn’t enough.

If you’re reselling a phone, tablet or laptop. Perform a factory reset and/or securely wipe the drive. Mac and iPhone can be factory reset to wipe data. Android devices are the same. Windows devices need more attention and will require the use of DBAN or professional data wiping from Dave’s Computers.

As you can see, trusting someone other than us or yourself could be a big mistake!

Most instances of ransomware target small businesses but many target home users too. We all have credit cards, bank accounts, retail accounts and data we would rather not share. All of this is prime fodder for ransomware. Yet, with a backup, the threat of having all your data deleted is made worthless.

All of us here at Dave’s Computers in New Jersey reserve a special place in the underworld for those who write and spread ransomware. Of all the things humans do to other humans online, this is one of the worst.

What is ransomware?

Ransomware is exactly what its name suggests. It is malware delivered onto a computer through phishing, infected ads and the usual ways. Rather than copy your data and send it to a server somewhere, it encrypts it on your hard drive. All of your data is secretly encrypted in the background with you even knowing.

Then, once everything has been encrypted, the ransomware will show an alert telling you what has been done. It will provide a cryptocurrency address where you have to send a specified amount within a given time. In return, the hacker will provide a decryption key to release your data.

It’s a particularly evil attack that uses psychology against you. There is a ticking clock counting down, there may be a snapshot of your hard drive showing you exactly what you could lose and there is usually some kind of threat to delete all your data if you don’t pay up.

How does a backup protect from ransomware?

If ransomware makes it onto your computer past your antivirus and malware scanner, it is able to secretly encrypt your data without letting you know until it’s too late. However, if you have a backup of your data, the threats are worthless.

The main threat of ransomware is the loss of all your important files. If you have them backed up and that backup is recent, there is no threat as you can recover them from backup. No need for data recovery, no need to pay the ransom and no need to be threatened on your own computer.

The steps to take would be:

1. Check your backup from a separate computer to make sure it’s intact and has everything. Do not check from your infected computer in case your backup becomes infected too.
2. Wipe your infected computer using your OS installation disc.
3. Use DBAN or other secure drive wiper to make sure all traces of the ransomware has been overwritten.
4. Reload your operating system using your installation media.
5. Download a copy of your backup to restore everything to how it was.
6. Upgrade or change your antivirus and malware scanner so it doesn’t happen again.

While ransomware is very clever at finding its way onto a computer, most competent antivirus or security programs should pick it up as soon as it activates. If yours didn’t, it is worth changing it for a better one.

If you need professional data recovery or help removing ransomware from your device, Dave’s Computers in New Jersey can help.

Dave’s Computers in New Jersey works a lot with our local community performing data recovery and general computer and network services. One thing we like to tell everyone is the importance of backups. We all know we need them but few actually get around to doing them. One thing we suggest a lot is an offsite backup.

An offsite backup is a backup of your critical data stored elsewhere. For businesses, this could be your disaster recovery location, data storage facility or in the cloud. For home users, this is usually the cloud. With many cloud providers offering gigabytes of storage for free, it makes sense to use some of that storage for backups.

Preventing data loss with offsite backups

An effective backup solution is a copy stored locally and at least one copy offsite. That way, if something happens to your home, like fire or burglary, you have another copy of all your data safe in the cloud. You may never need it and you may never use it but it will be there if you do.

Our data recovery services are very good but they take time and are not guaranteed to recover everything. Our success rate is very high but data recovery is an inexact science and computers just love to overwrite data to save space. Once overwritten, that data is extremely difficult to salvage. Nothing is impossible though!

Data backup and security

Data backups are essential for preserving personal data, family pictures and anything you don’t want to or cannot afford to lose. With most of us putting more of our documents and data on the computer, the requirement to keep it safe becomes more important.

With malware, ransomware and viruses on the increase, it isn’t just hardware failure or accident that causes data loss. Attacks are becoming more sophisticated all the time and while new viruses are decreasing, attempted attacks by existing ones are not. New malware and ransomware is being developed constantly and malware scanners struggle to keep up.

An offsite data backup protects your from all these threats, accidents, hardware failures and attack.

Setting up offsite backups is very straightforward. If you use Windows, OneDrive is built in and can be configured to backup your files. If you use Mac, TimeMachine does the same thing. There are also lots of third party programs for both systems that can copy and back up entire drives or folders as needed.

It takes less than 15 minutes to set up an offsite backup. Considering the potential of data loss, it makes perfect sense to do it. If you need help setting it up, Dave’s Computers will help.

Programs are growing in size, games often exceed 50GB, Mac often uses lots of storage in unexplained ways and makes it difficult for you to find out exactly what’s going on. Not knowing what’s on your disk is a good way to lose some of it. As Dave’s Computers is concentrating on data recovery and loss, we want to help you avoid that!

This tutorial will show you exactly what is using your hard drive space so you can clean it up.

Finder isn’t always as good as we would like when it comes to analyzing disk space. It can find lots of programs and files but misses quite a few as well. We don’t trust it here at Dave’s Computers and use third party tools instead. You may benefit from doing the same.

Daisy Disk

Daisy Disk is a great looking disk analyzer that tells you exactly what’s going on with your drives. It has a free trial but is otherwise just $10. It’s a very simple app to use but powerful under the hood. Through a very straightforward UI you can see exactly what is installed on your Mac, how much disk space it uses and even delete it from within the app.

Daisy Disk also works with attached storage and network storage so if you have external disks, you can maintain those too.

GrandPerspective

GrandPerspective is another data visualizer that is a version of a Windows app that works the same way. It’s a graphical representation of your disk that lets you drill down to exactly what is where and how much disk it uses. You can then delete the data as you need.

Be careful though. Get GrandPerspective from the App Store and you’ll pay $1.99 for it. Download it directly from the source and it’s free. The program is open source so you really shouldn’t need to pay for it.

OmniDiskSweeper

OmniDiskSweeper is another free disk analyzer to see what’s using all your Mac storage. It isn’t as pretty as Daisy Disk or GrandPerspective but gets the job done. The interface is a bit like Finder and lists everything on your drives in a hierarchical layout. You can see which folders take up most space and can drill down until you know exactly what is installed where.

OmniDiskSweeper is also free and is regularly updated by the team behind it.

Whatever tool you use to check your Mac disk space, run it and then run About This Mac and Storage to see how much MacOS misses. I bet you’ll see far more data with these tools than within the Storage app!

If you need help optimizing your Mac, need to replace a hard disk or free up space, Dave’s computers in New Jersey can help. We are Apple experts and would be more than happy to prove it!

It’s easy to accidentally delete data. We have all done it and we will all do it again. The data recovery guys here at Dave’s Computers are always busy but some of the jobs we do are unnecessary as you could easily do it at home. That doesn’t mean we won’t do it, of course we will but some of this stuff is easy.

The specific steps you take depend on what has happened. For example, if you accidentally deleted some files fairly recently, it could take seconds to recover them. If you did it a little while ago or have used the computer a lot since, it may take a little longer. Don’t worry, if you can’t recover your files, we can!

Recover deleted files in Mac OS

The easiest thing to try first is to look in the Trash. This is where all your deleted files (that aren’t too large) will sit for a while before being cleaned. If you recently deleted files, you should look here first.

Double click the trashcan icon and work through the files in the list. If you see your files, right click and select Put Back. Your files will be replaced where they were originally and you will be able to use them normally.

If your files aren’t there, we can use Time Machine. If you use Time Machine that is.

As long as you have Time Machine set up, we can use that to recover deleted data.

1. Select Time Machine and then Enter Time Machine.
2. Select the arrow and navigate the various snapshots until you find the file you need.
3. Select the file and then Restore.

Your file will be returned from whence it came and will be usable as before.

If you deleted music or a movie, you can use iTunes to recover it.

1. Open iTunes and search in Trash and in Media.
2. Recover it if you find it or re-download it from iTunes.

Even though you have deleted something from iTunes, if you have paid for it you can just download it again. iTunes trash works the same was as it does in Mac OS. It keeps recently deleted files and will periodically delete those as it goes.

If you cannot find your files and you either cannot find it in Time Machine or don’t use Time Machine, bring your Mac to Dave’s Computers in New Jersey. Our data recovery experts should be able to recover the files and restore them as if nothing happened!