With the value on information rising day by day, one of the greatest threats to businesses of any size is data loss. If the data centers in your business have ever experienced a hard drive disaster, you quicky realized just how valuable the information lost is.

And then, the situation becomes even worse, when you realize how much it is going to cost for a disaster recovery specialist to try and retrieve or restore your data for you.

Here are some basic tips for avoiding such a situation.

1. If you company is using older computers, be sure your tech support is regulary checking for any problems on your hard drives. By discovering problems before they have a chance to wreak havock on your data, they will have an opportuntiy to back the data up before it is no longer retrievable.

2. Make sure your techies are giving you the old hard disks when they do hard drive upgrades on your systems. Even when the information has been copied onto new disks, the old drives still contain all your valuable data. You don't want this getting into the wrong hands. Plus, it is always good to have a backup while the new hardware is settling in.

3. Especially in a fast paced office environment, the thousands of computer files can become disorganized over time. Make sure your computer support is running defragmentation programs on a regular basis.

4. Keep the operating systems the same across all machines in your office. This will help prevent hard drive corruption from various users incorrectly installing programs on a system they are not familiar with. Better yet, leave program installation, removal and system partitioning to your tech support.

5. Make sure employess report any problems that crop up on their machines. If even one computer starts acting strangely, running slower, or giving error messages, have support run a scan disk or CHKDSK immediately. Remember, it will be much cheaper to repair one computer's hard drive than to pick up the tab after a total system disaster!

Keeping the following tips in mind when creating your data loss disaster prevention plan will help limit not only headaches, but losses to your bottom line.

James B. Allen blogs regularly about disaster recovery planning. To learn more about data recovery and other aspects of disaster recovery, visit James at: DisasterRecoveryData.com.