Deep Dive - Disaster Recovery

A system failure at home can ruin your day; Darien Graham-Smith gets ready for the worst to happen, and explores what you can do when it does

- Darien Graham-Smith

An unexpected outage or data loss can be hugely costly to a business – but when disaster strikes at home the stakes are arguably even higher. Over time, a healthy company will (hopefully) recover from a one-off incident, whereas if your half-finished novel and that folder full of videos from your last family holiday are lost then you may never get them back.

It might be overkill to draw up a formal set of recovery procedures for your personal devices, but it’s important to have some idea of your exposure, and your remediation options if the worst comes to pass. Here’s our guide to recovering from the most common disaster scenarios, and how to protect yourself before they happen.

Recovering lost files

There are lost files, and then there are lost files. Sometimes, when I can’t find a document that I swear I’ve saved in such and such a folder, it turns out that I’ve been tripped up by a Save requester opening at an unexpected location. A quick file search reveals that the file I thought I’d saved to Documents is actually sitting pretty in Downloads.

But what if you’re certain that a file has vanished? If, for example, it appears in a Recent files list but now comes back with a “not found” error, then a little more sleuthing is required. If the folder is linked to a cloud service such as Dropbox or Google Drive, the cause could be a synchronization error with one of your other devices or a well-meaning bit of housekeeping by someone else with access. This is easy to check and resolve: log into the Dropbox or Google Drive website and you can audit all file activity, and restore any files that have been changed or deleted in the past 30 days.