In concern of Information Technology, the term data loss refers to an unforeseen loss of precious information or data. An occurrence of the data loss is called Data Loss Event. The data loss affects an organization or general user in many ways ranging from decreased market value to financial loss.

There are several possible factors that can cause data loss. Some of the most important factors of data loss are as follows:

·         Intentional Action such as intentional deletion of file or an application

·         Unintentional Action like Accidental Deletion of file or application, misplacement of backup or storage media, inability to read unknown file format of a specific file and administrative errors.

·          Failure like power failure that can result in the loss of information that is in volatile memory, hardware failure such as head crash, a software freeze or crash that can result in data loss, poor usability or bugs in the system or application software and data corruption like database corruption or file system corruption.

·         Natural disasters like fire, flood, tornado and earthquake

·         Crimes like sabotage, theft of resources and malicious programs like viruses, worm and theft of physical media

Researches show that hardware failure and human errors are the most common reasons of the data loss and accounts approximately three quarters of all data loss accidents.

No matter what was the reason of data loss, the ultimate result would be very drastic. Sometimes it can even destroy your business if you have lost some of the irreplaceable information. The financial cost of the data depends on the importance of the data and what type of business you have. Data loss can also decrease the market value of the brand and can also reduce the customer reliability. The recovery cost is also included in the cost of data loss that can be different according to the reason of data loss and the solution you have taken.

If your data has been lost due to some of the physical reasons such as hardware failure, and hard drive head crash, you will need for a data recovery service that can cost up to thousands of dollars. In case the data has been lost due to logical reasons such as accidental deletion, and file system corruption, you can recover data with the help of data recovery software that is available in few hundred dollars.