Steve Lane, PC PAL franchisee for Leicester South and Market Harborough writes:

A few weeks ago a customer asked me how a hard drive might
become corrupted.  I answered that it
could be a number of things from power spikes to cosmic rays.  He retorted some comment about cosmic rays and
I think he thought I was pulling his leg a little.  But the truth is that cosmic rays are energy
particles originating from outer space that can have an effect on electronics.   Our sun emits low energy cosmic rays which
increase in intensity during solar flares.

The effect on computer electronics can be quite
considerable.  The computer works by
using states to indicate if a bit is storing a one or a zero.  You can think of it like a light switch.  When the light is on the state is said to be
representing one.  When it is off it is
said to be representing a zero. By using a series of ones and zeros we can
represent something like this document I am typing. The letter “A” for example
is represented by the binary number “In October 2008 cosmic rays may have been responsible for
causing a Quantas aircraft to nosedive twice leaving eleven passengers injured.  The wrong data was sent to the main computer
from the “data inertial reference unit”. 
The consequences of the wrong data being sent could have been much more
serious.  Computers these days are
ubiquitous such as controlling engines in our cars, controlling the flow of
electricity, air traffic control or equipment in operating theatres. Computer
information is relied on to make life or death decisions.  So flipping the switch and changing the data
in a safety critical system may cause a catastrophe.  Fortunately, most of these systems do have a
way of checking and recovering from spurious data.  However most home computers do not use these
error checking routines, so cosmic rays are a fact of our computing life.

In the home or small business computer there is not much we
can do to stop the cosmic rays.  We can
however be prepared for data corruption or loss by implementing a best practice
backup and recovery strategy.  Here are 5
best practices that I recommend: -

1.      
Decide what you need to backup and how often.  A question you could ask yourself is “What
data could I not do without for a day/week/month or if I could not ever get it
back?”The answers to these questions can determine how often you backup.

2.      
Backup to a local source such as an external
hard disk, USB key or to a rewritable DVD

3.      
Use an online backup service that automatically
backs your data up so that you have an offsite copy of your data – we can
advise you on a suitable service for your home PC or your small business

4.      
From time to time, test if you can restore.  Make sure you the files that you think are
safe are really safe.

5.      
If you are a small business, start to think
about disaster recovery and business continuity planning.  What would you do if you suffered major data
loss?  In my next blog entry I will be
looking at the whole subject of disaster recovery and the common steps that any
business can take to ensure that after disaster strikes business can continue.'

Steve Lane (PC
PAL, South Leicester & Market Harborough)