What is data decay and how does it affect your business?

Do you use a software system in your business?
Does your software system deal with client contact information?

If you answered ‘yes’ to both questions, chances are extremely high that you face the inevitable issue of data decay.
(If you answered ‘no’, you probably deal with data decay anyway, but should definitely implement a software solution to digitize your customer information first.)

What is data decay?

Data decay refers to the gradual loss of data within a system. There are two main classifications of data decay: mechanical and logical.

Mechanical Data Decay

Mechanical data decay is probably the more well-known form of data decay. Server crashed, hard disk corrupted and all your CRM records vanished without a trace? That’s mechanical data decay at work, and as you can probably tell by now, it’s not a pretty thought.

Data decay happens on a mechanical level everyday even if you do nothing to it. Every time data is written to or read from a storage medium, there’s a chance that corruption will occur or that the medium will fail.

Based on a BackBlaze article, some drives they used had an annual failure rate as high as 25.4%.

There is only one solution to mechanical data decay: backup. A solid backup strategy is essential for any system, and thankfully most companies realize this and do their due backups.

However just backing up data isn’t enough. Sometimes, unbeknownst to you, undetected corrupted data can still find their way into your backups.

Here, another key data management concept comes into place: integrity checking.

Most of you, at some point, have probably edited a Microsoft Word document, experienced a crash and when you returned, Word prompted you with a restoration option from an auto-saved version. This is integrity checking in its simplest form.

A typical editing / saving process of a Microsoft Word document goes something like this: