Midland Computers

Is Your Data Safe In The Event of a Power Cut

It's a bit windy out there...the weather has not been kind to us recently.


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With the elements battering businesses up and down the country...is your data safe in the event of a power cut or surge?


Does your equipment have a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) attached that can safely shut down your systems in the event of power failure?

So, what happens when the power fails?


When the power fails, no individual component gets a clean shutdown command - power is just removed. When this happens, some parts of your system may last longer than other parts. One of the first things that will happen, is that the memory will no longer be refreshed properly (This needs to be refreshed constantly otherwise it will lose its data) and very rapidly, the memory will contain only garbage. The hard drives and Direct Memory Access controller however, will run a bit longer; so if data is being written to disk, the controller will keep reading data from memory, but it has no idea that this data is corrupted. Over the course of time hard drives that have reached a certain age may 'die' when the machine is powered up again. This is just some of the effects on your hardware...software can also be affected.