Data Recovery Blog

As a society, we’re creating data at a truly unprecedented rate. For some, the reasons why are plain to see; for others, it’s much less obvious. Here, in Fields Data Recovery's opinion, are the five main reasons why we desperately need more room for our data.

1.       The internet

We’ve started with the internet because absolutely no one can dispute that it’s played a key role in our recent data explosion. Following its launch, large companies began creating websites. Over time, companies and organisations of all shapes and sizes came to recognise the importance of having an online presence. We all then got in on the act and – thanks to technology having become more accessible and internet speeds continuously improving – started setting up our own websites and blogs discussing everything from our experiences as parents to gardening. In fact, there are currently 1.8 billion websites – and they all need to be stored somewhere!

Also, let’s not forget that increasing internet speeds means that we now access much of what we’d normally store on or access through a physical device (word documents on hard drives, films on DVDs etc.) online. Additionally, we also download more content and store it on our devices, too.

2.       Smartphones

Much like the internet, smartphones are now omnipresent, resulting in us creating more and more data on a daily basis – particularly photographs.

All of this content – whether an image, a text message, saved game or anything else – takes up space in our phone’s storage media and, more often than not, further space on a server somewhere. The amount contributed daily by a single user may be moderate, but with millions of people now using smartphones, it means that terabytes of data is being created on a daily basis.

3.       Everything’s digital

Whilst we previously had collections of records, DVDs and books, we now stream the vast majority of our entertainment. If it’s a text that we really love we download it to our device so we can watch it, view it or read it whilst we’re offline.

This becomes a greater problem when the following point comes in to play.

4.       Files are getting bigger

First there was standard definition, then high definition and now ultra-high definition. Granted not all of the files in the world are audio or video, but this trend is reflective of data packets in general: quality is improving and, as a direct result, file size is growing. When this is combined with the fact that several competing providers need to host identical files across multiple servers to accommodate their users the problem increases tenfold.

5.       The value of data

You’ve probably come across the term ‘big data’ before but may not have been entirely sure what it referred to. Well, to put it simply, big data refers to gargantuan sets of data which companies, researchers, academics or anyone else can analyse in order to gain insight into how we behave, our preferences and more.

As I’m sure you can imagine, such institutions are reluctant to delete even a byte of data when it could lead to something that’ll help them sell more products, win more votes or anything else. As a result, they are storing gargantuan data sets which are continuously getting larger as more and more information is fed into them.

Trust us, when someone contacts us to enquire about RAID data recovery, server data recovery or any other task concerning business data, the value they attach to it is clear; they want it back rapidly.