Data Storage and Corruption

Keeping personal data safe is becoming more and more of a concern for large computer and security companies, Microsoft, Apple and Norton just to name a few. Data corruption occurs mostly in 3 ways, either from a virus, hardware failure, or from data transmission, and both can be devastating to those precious business files and personal photos.

To prevent data corruption we first have to learn how data is written, and how data is transferred. We can store data is many ways. We could start with paper, but come-on get with the new age. Paper is obsolete. Focusing on mass data storage, data is written to metal plates magnetically, or onto NAND type storage (commonly used in Flash Disk drives). The data is written, on a very basic look, in 1's and 0's that follow a convention. For example, the letter A is written, following the ASCII convention as → 01000001, within a bunch of other data to indicate the start and end of a file. For images, colors are communicated similarly.

When data is transferred locally, the CPU finds the start of the data, finds a place to put it on the destination, and writes it. When data is transferred remotely it connects via a protocol ( a computer language, so both computers can talk. Then the processor reads the source data and copies the 0's and 1's onto the destination. Data corruption occurs when this data changes somehow and some 0's and 1's are lost or missed. For a text document, a corrupt data set could just mean that a word is missing a letter, which isn't too bad, but if the data is code (processing instructions) it can cause all sorts of errors. This mostly only happens if there's a programmatic fault, or if the data checker replies with bad data.

With the advance of wireless technologies, data integrity is the focus. Wireless signals can be interrupted by other frequencies such as microwaves and rain very easily. So the speed of wireless is the maximum speed it can write accurate data, without loss.

Stopping data corruption locally is all done by the operating system (Microsoft Windows) and drivers. But if you've had a virus that'd be designed to deliberately corrupt data come through, or a hard drive failure, the data can be sometimes very tricky to restore, even extremes like removing the magnetic disk and reading it with a different head sometimes can prove to be unsuccessful. The best way to protect your data is to back it up.

Backing up your data should be as high priority as saving that document while your working. The last thing you want, especially in business or as a student is to loose that data. Automatic backup programs are very readily available and with the right version on windows, included. Backup alternatives include putting drives into a RAID formation, using a Network Attached storage device or simply burning a DVD using either an internal DVD drive or external USB DVD drive will protect all that precious data. External backups are preferable, the further away from the source, the better.