Data integrity
Backing up data is the single most important step in
preventing data loss. Entire companies have gone out of
business due to losing valuable information. An enormous
amount of man hours are spent every year reproducing
information which was lost in some manner. Back ups can
be on removable disks, tapes, paper printouts or other
computer systems. It is important to periodically put
copies of these back ups in remote physical locations to
prevent loosing the orignal and back up data through
fire, etc.
In today's world, virus protection is a necessity for
any PC or Macintosh and viruses are starting to appear
on UNIX systems also. No system is completely safe from
viruses since manufacturers have inadvertantly shipped
new computers with viruses on the hard drive and minted
CDs with viruses.
For very important data, RAID systems are used. RAID
stands for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks". A
raid system is a computer with eight or more hard drives
and software for storing data on those drives. Every
byte of data is spread across all of these drives along
with a parity bit that tells if it was an odd or even
byte. In the event that a disk fails, it's contents can
be completely reconstructed from the data on the other
seven disks. This is a good way to store critical data
which could not be reproduced, but the expense may not
be justified otherwise
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