1. Introduction

You might think that the most valuable item a company owns is its computers. Although they are expensive, you would be wrong.

The thing that is worth the most to any company is their data.

Surprising? Not when you think about it. If a machine breaks down or even gets stolen, a company can go out and buy a new one to replace it. Yes, it costs them a fair whack, but they can probably find the money from somewhere.

Whereas, if they lose their data, this is very hard to replace. For example they could lose their customer list, lose their sales records, lose their accounts, lose all the information about their product and the list goes on and on.

Data is invaluable to a company and if it were to be lost, the company would probably be crippled in the short term, and go out of business pretty soon afterwards.

It is not just businesses who would suffer from a loss of their data, it could be you.

You have just finished your three pieces of coursework, that took you months to complete. Thank goodness you are going to hand them in tomorrow and get them out of the way.

BUT..... you try to switch on your machine, only to see those awful words 'hard disk failure'. It's all gone.

All of your work was saved on that machine. How much would you pay to get the coursework back so you don't miss your deadline?

But of course, you wouldn't need to worry, because you made backups - or did you?