Too many companies wrongly assume that data backups stored on flood-damaged tapes and hard drives cannot be recovered, and fail to include lost data on insurance claims.

Bill Margeson, president and chief executive of CBL Data Recovery Technologies, said that technicians have been able to retrieve data from hard disks affected by mudslides in the past.

“You’d be surprised how much damage a computer hard drive can endure, yet many companies write off damaged data storage media prematurely,” Margeson said.

Many corporate branch offices, particularly in the retail industry, still rely on local backups to store data, though many have started to replicate mission-critical information to secondary sites over a wide area network (WAN).

Shops and businesses across the Midlands and northern England were hit by floods recently, with parts of central Sheffield left under water for days.