We have many customers contact us and say that they have a backup drive that they are no longer able to access the data from and they need the data recovered. Whenever this occurs the first thing we ask is where is the original data that the backup was made from. The usual answer is that the backup is the only copy of the data. If that is the case then the data on the backup drive is not a backup, it is the primary data. It seems obvious that this is the case but it is surprising how many people do not understand this basic concept – if it is the only copy of the data, it is not a backup.

We can only attribute this confusion to the fact that external hard drives are marketed and sold as backup drives and people feel safe once that data is written to these drives. The fact is, is that a large percentage of the recoveries that we do are on these external “backup” drives.

The takeaway from this is that if you intend to delete the data on your notebook or desktop computer once you have copied it to a backup drive, you need to buy two backup drives and copy the data to both of them.