Ever suffered the agony of losing precious data from your laptop or desktop? Individuals are not the only ones undergoing the ordeal, but corporates are also waking up to the threat.

Computer viruses may be revered as the epitome of data loss but human error most often causes the problem. Accidental formatting, file or folder deletion, dropped hard drive are some of human errors that cause data loss. Not just this, in these cases data recovery becomes all the more complex.

Interestingly, user?s nightmare is fast transforming into bountiful of business opportunities for a growing tribe of data recovery players. While the data recovery from disk is a fragmented market today, bigger players like Symantec, Trend Micro and Websense are eyeing the data loss prevention and data leakage prevention market. The market is clearly seeing a high level of activity. Symantec, for instance, has paid $350 million to purchase data leak prevention vendor Vontu, making it the latest security vendor to enter this new, but crowded market.

The government is arming itself to handle the loss of sensitive data. Prime Minister?s office, ISRO, Army headquarters, various ministries and public sector undertakings (PSU), have deployed tools to this effect. The security and law enforcement agencies are using data recovery services to investigate cases, wherein criminals have been intelligent enough to wipe off possible traces of their electronic heist.

Not to forget corporate biggies like

Air-India, Hindustan Lever, Siemens, Ranbaxy, Hyundai India and State Bank of India, who are joining the fast-growing list of adopters. Prominent among them are airline reservation systems, ecommerce portals and financial transactions between banks. Loss of data in all such cases can be fatal to businesses, since their revenue streams and their survival depends almost entirely on data.

Here again, Indian businesses have come to realise the seriousness of this issue and are beginning to do their bit. So much so, that large enterprises have started building the data loss prevention factor as an integral element in their annual maintenance contracts or service level agreements with IT service companies.

With egovernance perlocating down to tehsil and village levels, data on various citizen services is in high demand. Considering this, it has become relevant even for public offices to adopt appropriate measures for prevention of data loss.

While a spin-off of this growing menace has resulted in the emergence of a fast-growing data recovery industry, it is imperative to take a grasp of this unwanted phenomenon ravaging the workforce globally. In the US, enterprises spent a whooping $11.8-billion last year alone, on recovering lost data.

While an estimated 15 million laptops suffer data loss annually, a good number of companies go out of business after losing critical data. An average of 80% of company data is stored on desktop PCs and laptops and is not backed up. Only 20% is stored on a server. Almost 55% of the workforce experiences 1-2 disk failures every year.

From the business perspective, almost 40% of data loss is caused by human errors, another 40% by application failures, and the remaining 20% by system/component failures, manmade causes, disasters, etc, says Soumitra Agarwal, marketing director of NetApp India.

In India too, the data recovery market has touched the Rs 150-crore mark, and is growing at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30-35%, informs Alok Gupta, director, Unistal Systems.

However, the unorganised sector accounts for a majority of this pie with very few national players in the fray. Besides the data recovery market, there are associated businesses as well, that have mushroomed lately. Quite a few players of repute have diversified into data loss prevention and recovery education. Not to forget the data recovery services like those that can be obtained online by connecting the media (hard disk, etc) to the data recovery lab over internet.

?These associated businesses and the data recovery operations performed by the IT service companies for their clients as a part of their ongoing contract may well ensure that the data recovery market grows by leaps and bounds here,? adds Gupta.

Typically in India, the type of user of a data recovery major?s service breaks down as follows: corporate 45%, SOHO (home) 30%, government/PSU 10%, personal 15%. Individuals who have laptops and smartphones are more prone to data loss because these equipment are independent islands of information as against desktops in a network, wherein data can be restored again from the server backups.

?We receive around 5,000 media for data recovery every year. A majority of users are still not aware of the possibilities of data recovery after a data loss incident and estimate in excess of 50,000 such incidents annually,? says Sunil Chandana, director, Stellar Information Systems.

?The number of accidental deletions are astounding. Corporations are aware of the impact on their bottom line. It?s a very significant problem that affects their return on investment,? says Subhomoy Biswas, country manager, India, SonicWALL. Quoting from a study conducted by the Ponemon Institute, he informs that lost data translates to lost business opportunity. This mainly comes in the form of customer churn and customer acquisition costs, which rose from $98 per record in 2006 to $128 in 2007?a 30% increase.

However, there?s hope round the corner. In fact, all data?irrespective of type?is recoverable, aided by data recovery software and services provided it is not damaged due to bad sectors or overwritten by fresh data. ?In the event of anyone encountering loss of data, we strictly advise not to tamper with the system, not to perform self-help recovery processes or get it diagnosed by quacks,? insists Gupta.

Data recovery software and data recovery services are of real help in case of data loss. Data recovery software helps to recover formatted hard drives, lost partitions, deleted files, lost folders, corrupt documents and archives, corrupt spreadsheets and database. It also helps to recover damaged email from the desktop.

Typically, at the recovery lab of a data recovery firm, every disk received is provided a code number; data recovered is enumerated in a directory file and emailed to the user. After the user confirms that the data recovered is satisfactory, the data is then written on to a DVD/CD and delivered against the work order.

However, data recovery software has its limitations, says Chandana. In case of physical damage, encrypted hard drives and overwritten data, data recovery software is not the right option. In such a scenario, data recovery services play a pivotal role. Through data recovery services, one can recover data when the software does not work, physically damaged hard drives and drives with firmware corruption. Data recovery services also help to recover RAID servers, storage media like NAS/SAN/DAS, encrypted drives, legacy storage media, operating systems and also any other complex data recovery.

?However, while choosing a data recovery services player, one should be sure about the data confidentiality at the service provider?s end. This is very important,? adds Chandana. He says that it is also important to opt for a service provider, having a class 100 clean room (a drive operations room where there are less than 100 dust particles of diameter less than 0.5 micron in cubic feet of air). Typically, a normal office space has 1-10 million dust particles. A hard drive that is opened in such environment, would suffer permanent damage and that would remove all possibilities of data recovery.

Players like Unistal have recently launched online data recovery services. Through this, the company promises to provide instant solutions to its customers and partners anywhere in the world. Its proprietary connectivity tools link-up the customer?s server or PC. Technicians at the company?s recovery lab proceed to perform the recovery or repair process.

?Remote data recovery enables us to perform recovery from all versions and types of Windows, Linux, Macintosh, Novell, Unix, RAID servers, mail servers and database servers. This obviates the need to send the media (hard disk) to our master labs. The customers can, therefore, recover their data either from their own premises or from any of our authorised online partner?s facility,? says Gupta.

?We have the expertise to perform data recovery from all versions and types of Windows, Linux, Macintosh, Novell, Unix, RAID servers, mail servers and database servers,? he informs.

It must be accepted that causes of data loss cannot be eliminated completely. What is more important is to be able to recover quickly from a data loss, so as to minimise impact on business operation.