With exponential advances in computer technology (this piece refers to business computers) it follows that the breakdowns become complex; the data recovery industry is thriving when you would think it would be eliminated by fantastic network design and spiffy hardware that never fails. In the competitive world of business, when money is on the line Murphy's Law kicks in: if something can go wrong it will go wrong and usually at the very worst time.

RAID arrays are set up to provide redundancy and to detect problems ahead of time. Redundancy is a basic concept to protect against sudden disaster, especially in computing. It's easy to forget doing a back-up after the day's work; this can be dangerous for laptops…they can be dropped, lost, stolen, or simply crash. It's a good idea to put your updated work on a disk or e-mail the files to yourself. Accidently deleted files are taken off the index but they can be recovered within a certain time frame since they are present on the hard drive until the space is needed.

Sizeable companies and their IT departments have no doubt experienced the panic of system freezes and crashes that put them under great pressure to get the office computers back onto the network soonest; many companies can lose $70K per hour or more due to downtime. When call centers can't make sales there may be several floors of hourly employees sitting around having coffee at the company's expense. Sometimes the staff will be sent home for the day without pay if the computers stay down too long, making a negative impact on worker morale and taking a hit on the day's profits.

In a worst-case scenario there could be significant data loss if the upper levels of the RAID array are damaged. These RAID levels are logical units of data distribution and storage to increase uptime. A RAID 1 level disk can be read as one single disk and data recovery software can retrieve the loss. When RAID 5 or other distributed arrays fail the data recovery procedure is complex and will require a specialist firm with clean room labs so that great care is taken to get back as much data as possible.

A skilled operator is needed to set up and monitor the RAID array so that he can spot failing drives, replace them, and rebuild the array if necessary. Uptime can be maximized and data loss can be prevented, at least in theory. The human factor has shown to be a major cause of lost files; corruption or theft may necessitate erasing incriminating data. There are sometime angry employees getting back at the company. It's estimated that 70% of data loss is caused by human sabotage of some sort. Depending on location there may be a corrupt government hacking into the system. Viruses are always around; hopefully virus-makers don't work for virus protection companies in the way that big pharmaceutical companies create a need for their products.

In the UK data recovery companies abound; sending a hard drive in by courier can reduce the downtime and have your data back usually within 48 hours. Large corporations have IT departments with staff familiar with data recovery but smaller companies are at the mercy of their damaged hardware. For those companies too small to justify RAID array servers, there is the option of off-site backup (remote back-up) where they can replicate between 2 data centers to keep everything up to date.