Data Backup Digest

With popular, longstanding currencies now in question, and as many customers are left unable to trust their banks, it should come as no surprise that consumers around the world are starting to invest their monies into other forms of coinage. In fact, digital forms of currency, such as BitCoin, DogeCoin LiteCoin and more, have enjoyed tremendous consumer interest as of late. However, like with all things digital, these new forms of money are not exempt from theft, fraud and other types of corruption.

How to Store and Safeguard your Digital Currency
By default, any digital currency under your possession is stored remotely on third-party servers. While these servers are secure, they are still susceptible to power outages, data corruption and even malicious system hacks. As such, it's always a good idea to backup your digital currency not only remotely, but locally, as well. Thankfully, most of the popular digital currency providers offer an easy solution to backing up your online accounts.

One of the simplest and most effective means of backing up your digital currency, ironically, is to create printed hardcopies of all your digital currency records. While it may seem slightly counterintuitive to backup your digital currency with older technology, printed records are far more secure and reliable than any type of digital storage.

Another way to keep your digital currency safe and secure is by backing up your "wallet.dat" file to multiple locations. You should be making regular backups of this file regardless, especially if you have a significant investment into digital currency, but saving the backup in one location is simply not enough. If that drive or media crashes or becomes unusable in any way, then you will still be left without a functional backup of the "wallet.dat" file. Copying the "wallet.dat" file to several different locations, perhaps on different forms of media, will provide several failover options in the case of an emergency.

Chris Bross, senior enterprise recovery engineer with DriveSavers, attempted to shed some light on the most common problems he's seen concerning BitCoin and other forms of digital currency in the 21st century. He was quoted as saying: "In general, hardware failures of the storage devices are more common, but in many of these cases the users were completely at fault because they deleted the data, and in two cases, even overwrote it,” he said. "In almost all cases, the user was keeping only a single copy of their wallet.dat file on a single storage device. Three of the eight total cases were stored on a SSD (sold state drive), while the others were on HDDs. In all cases, the users did not trust the available cloud backup or other options to replicate their critical BitCoin data."

In the event that you suffer from a loss or corruption of your digital currency data, DriveSavers currently offers a plethora of restoration and recovery options. While they do not participate in tracking or locating stolen currency, they do provide data forensic services for use in court cases and other legal proceedings.