I’d hazard a guess most people, and not just executives, find email either the top or tied at the top for the most valuable data on a hard drive.
Now for a casual user who backs up nothing and has a priceless collection of photos or video email could come in second, but many ordinary users who do at least rudimentary backing up of documents, images and other like data fail to back up email folders, and even such mundane-seeming items such as favorites or cookies. After a failure all of these will be missed, probably more than realized.
Back to c-level executives, I can completely see where email is the most critical datato get back. The email inbox is truly a virtual inbox of work-to-do, information to process and documents to attend to. Losing that can be devastating. Too many executives allow the inbox or other email folders become the de facto storage spot for very important information.
Food for thought, and a lesson to remember — back up thoroughly and often.
From the link:
With so much valuable and confidential information in our inboxes, it’s no wonder 81% would recover that data first. There’s a strong legal argument for better backup, too.
E-mail is the most valued business document, according to a recent survey from Kroll Ontrack Inc.
Kroll asked 200 business executives across Canada, the U.S. and Europe which business documents they would most prefer to recover in the event of data loss. Eighty one per cent reported they would save their mailboxes.
E-mail is of critical importance because it contains so much information, said Dave Pearson, senior storage research analyst with IDC Canada.
“Test contracts to vendors or clients, confidential memos … all sorts of work documents, process documents, presentations, sales materials, all those things pass through your e-mail at different times,” he said.
Large organizations, especially those subject to lawsuits, should have a centralized backup repository for their e-mail, Pearson suggested. “It just makes the discovery process so much easier and so much less expensive for them,” he said.
But many companies still lack a well-thought-out e-mail archival policy. “A lot of companies may not realize how much of their business is contained in their e-mail or how many confidential or important things are said in e-mail that they need to keep track of,” said Pearson.
Backing up e-mail is a high priority in the enterprise and a vital practice for IT, according to George Goodall, senior research analyst at London-based Info-Tech Research Group Inc.
E-mail is very much the lifeblood of any organization, he said. “Many people, especially executives, use e-mail as a knowledge repository … the problem is, it’s a very difficult thing to backup and more importantly, it’s difficult to restore.”