In 1998, Pixar Animation Studios was working on the sequel of one of its most famed movies: Toy Story 2. It was set to release the following year to theaters when someone mistakenly ran an incorrect command on Pixar’s servers that essentially told the system to root its way through all entries below the current directory and wipe them out entirely. The whole movie got deleted.

“The system was recursively tracking down through the file structure and deleting its way out like a worm eating its way out from the core of an apple,” Oren Jacob, chief technical officer of Pixar, told The Next Web. By the time they finally yanked the power, 90% of the movie had evaporated. Only 10% of what was originally there remained.

But by a stroke of pure luck, Gayln Susman, a technical director of the film, had a backup copy on her home computer – she was working from home to care for her newborn.

Susman’s computer was hauled out of her house, tucked into the back of her Volvo, padded with a bunch of blankets and transported back to the studio to save the now iconic movie.

How would you like to be the employee who ran that command?

It doesn’t matter how unpleasant a scenario it is to think about: every business needs a data recovery plan. Data loss can severely impact operations, leading to potential indefinite business closure, financial losses, and damage to credibility and reputation that can snowball into failure when it comes to meeting long-term goals. Some of these resulting damages can be irreparable.

A data recovery plan ensures that critical data can be restored quickly in the event of a system failure, cyberattack, natural disaster, human error, or hardware malfunction, allowing the business to maintain regular operations and minimize downtime – potentially putting you a step ahead of your competitors.

Prevent financial loss

Data loss can disrupt operations, leading to lost revenue from inability to access customer information or process transactions, whether it be recurring or new business. Ransomware attacks in particular tend to target this sensitive information because of its leverage and potential legal consequences for businesses.

Protect business reputation

A data breach or significant data loss can damage a company's reputation and erode customer trust. 94% of organizations believe that customers won’t trust the organization enough to buy from them if they don’t believe their information is secure, according to this survey done by Cisco last year. That’s not unsubstantiated: 79% of Americans are concerned with how their data is being used, and 59% don’t even know how it is being used (Pew Research, 2019).

Compliance with regulations

Many industries have data security compliance regulations that require businesses to have robust data backup and recovery procedures. Pre-2023, it was forecasted that 65% of the world would have their data protected by modern security practices (Statista 2022). By the end of 2024, it rose to 75% (Gartner 2022), showing a positive trend to the importance of data security and expectations of business practices.

Ensure business continuity

A data recovery plan allows your business to quickly recover and resume operations after an incident, minimizing downtime. When you’re prepared with a plan in the worst case scenario, you can be ready to meet your customers’ needs, reaping the reward of your proactivity over your competitors in the situation of an industry-wide attack.

There are numerous ways something like this can go wrong, but most cyber attacks happen by some common causes that can be avoided just by being proactive and implementing best practices.

Hardware failure

Server crashes or hard drive failures can lead to data loss. It is always ideal for your business’ tech to be up to date to not only avoid the potential of data loss, but also to streamline productivity in general.

Cyberattacks

Malware, ransomware, and hacking attempts can corrupt or delete data. Cyberattackers understand the sensitivity of this sort of handled information, and are unforgiving, never hesitating to leverage this. Larger corporations face the brunt of these threats, but smaller businesses are vulnerable as well and also often don’t have the resources to recover as efficiently.

Human error

Accidental deletion of files or incorrect data entry can result in data loss. It never hurts to have a separate spot to safekeep your information in case your primary source fails (see: beginning of blog).

Natural disasters

Floods, fires, earthquakes, or other acts of God can damage physical storage devices and data.

So, what should an organization consider in the event of data loss? We offer data backup solutions to cover all your bases, including automated backup scheduling, secure cloud storage, disaster recovery strategies, and other data backup and recovery services. These are some of the considerations to make when combating data loss:

Regular backups: Implement a system to regularly back up critical data to multiple locations. The more sources, the better – just make sure they’re secured and accounted for.
Data redundancy: Store backups on different media types (e.g., local hard drives, cloud storage) to prevent complete data loss. No school like the old school… It’s much harder to ‘delete’ something physical than something metaphysical.
Testing procedures: Regularly test data backups to ensure they can be restored successfully. Pixar only found out that their backups hadn’t been working for a month when it was too late.
Incident response plan: Establish clear steps to take in case of a data loss event, including who to contact, what actions to take, who’s responsible for what, and a crisis communication plan.

We understand this topic is a bit intimidating, but don’t worry: we’re here to mitigate. Reach out to a Nerd today to talk about cybersecurity measures, your options – and how you can be one step ahead.