Most people don’t realize how important their data is until it is lost. Hard drive data recovery is needed for a variety of reasons, all of which are often ignored until it is too late. And in most cases, some people have had opportunities to protect their files from data loss and corruption, but may have thought one of these 5 common beliefs about their data and why they won’t need to find a hard drive data recovery company.
“My hard drive is brand new, so my data is safe” Have you ever bought a new toaster, coffee maker, DVD player, or even the most popular toy for your child only to have to return it or exchange it because there were problems with it? Then as you drive back to the store where it was purchased, you wonder how something you just purchased brand new could break so fast. Things break, brand new or old, that is why there are warranties! Regardless, a hard drive is no different. Each comes with a manufacturer’s warranty for the hard drive, but not the data. A data loss is your problem, not theirs.
So when your hard drive fails and you are left looking at a blank screen, a variety of error messages, or hear a loud clicking noise from the hard drive, you sit and slowly realize that your world is about to change. Your belief that the data on your new hard drive is safe from data corruption or mechanical hard drive failure erodes, and the panic begins to set in.
“We backup our data to a spare hard drive (or other media)”
It is always a good habit to backup your data. In fact, kudos to you if you do! Now, that you have patted yourself on the back for your fantastic disaster planning, do you recall when you last tested your backup? When was the last backup restored to verify the data, test the backup media, and confirm that the data stored is still relevant to your business?
This is often where problems arise. While it is great that a disaster recovery plan in place, is a backup from 1 month ago really of value? 1 year ago? 3 days ago? Loosing a few days or months of data from a home user’s point of view may not be such a big deal…as long as they have their important docs, pictures and MP3s.
However, depending on your business, several lost days of data can devastate a company. For the business community, a day of data loss can cost the company thousands of dollars and worst yet, customers.
“I run a RAID server, and because of that, my data is safe”
RAIDs are configured with multiple hard drives, at least 2, and the belief most people have is that their data is safe from data loss and they won’t ever need data recovery since they use a RAID server. In most cases that is true. However, when multiple hard drives fail, the risk of data loss increases. When a single hard drive in a RAID array fails, it can be replaced and the RAID can attempt to be rebuilt. When multiple hard drives fail, the rebuild process can possibly still be done, however there is a higher risk of data loss if the rebuild process fails.
If hard drives are moved around to different positions in the RAID, new hard drives added, and the swapping of good and defective hard drives are done, the risk of overwriting the RAID stripe and destroying that information reduces the chances of recovering data from that RAID. The safest way to ensure that your hard drive data is recoverable when your RAID looses a hard drive and becomes unhealthy is to seek out a data recovery company who are RAID recovery specialists. The more you (or your IT staff) attempt to repair and rebuild, the less of a chance that the data will ever be recovered.
“I don’t surf ‘questionable’ websites, so I won’t catch any viruses”
Of course you don’t. Nobody visits ‘questionable’ websites. Those websites all just are out there, with nobody visiting them at all. From the adult websites, free software websites, music websites, and every other website created by people that my have alterior motives and want to get at your data…any computer attached to the Internet is at risk for data intrusion and corruption.
Most businesses and home users have varying degrees of network security for their computers, which protect their data from most hard drive corruption, such as viruses. However, with with e-mail, instant messaging, file attachments and other such things shared by employees and friends, the risk to accidentally infect a hard drive with a virus increases.
Make sure you run some sort of anti-virus software and if possible a fire wall to protect yourself and your data from corruption. These two simple suggestions can save you hundreds of dollars in hard drive recovery.
“I definitely learned to expect the unexpected”
Life has a funny way of getting at you when you least expect it. Weather is the least planned for with regards to data loss, and for good reason. Mother nature like to keep us on our toes! She floods homes and businesses with water and causes major water damage, she throws lightning from the heavens which cause power surges and wrecks havoc on electronics, she waves tornados and hurricanes toward companies and consumers and send them scattering for safety, and she also scorches the earth with fire burning offices and homes and charring computers, servers and laptops.
Mother nature can also be kind and provide a beautiful day of warm sunshine. Allowing you to relax by the pool with your laptop, drinking some iced tea and getting some work done remotely…until somebody jumps into the pool and drenches your laptop with a wave of pool water. You can do everything to protect your data, but at some point, there will be a need for data recovery. It could be something due to a mechanical hard drive failure, file system corruption, or something as simple as ‘my kid poured water on my laptop’.
There are a lot of things that can go wrong and nobody and plan for all of them. But, when given the opportunity to protect your data from data loss, take the extra time to evaluate the value of the data on your hard drive and weigh it against the time it would take to rebuild it and how it would affect you if you were to lose it permanently.
If your hard drive is experiencing problems, your safest option is to turn the computer off. Continued use may damage the hard drive and make your data unrecoverable. You should then make a note of what happened and consider contacting a company that specializes in data recovery.
It’s a horrible moment when you realise that your report, college work, digital photos or other computer files have disappeared from your computer. But the situation isn’t as bad as it seems. The chances are that your files are still there. Your computer just can’t find them.
The most common reason why files are lost is that they were deleted. Perhaps you deleted them by mistake, or ran a disk cleanup utility that did it for you. The good news is that the data still exists. Only the pointers to where the data is have been erased. If it has not been long since the files were deleted, the space they occupied on the disk will not have been reused by another file, and there is a good chance that they can be recovered.
Another reason for data loss is overwriting. You save a file using the same name as another one, destroying the original. Again, the computer may not have used the same bit of disk space to store the new file as was occupied by the old one. The original data may still exist, even though it is no longer accessible by its filename.
Sometimes the file system becomes corrupt, and the computer loses track of things. This can result in missing files, corrupted files or even a computer that won’t start up at all. In this situation many people think that everything is lost, whereas in fact, this kind of problem is very often recoverable. Even if the system can’t be restored to a state in which it will run Windows, Mac OS or whatever operating system you are using, it is generally possible to recover your data files before reformatting the disk and reinstalling the operating system.
Hard disks and other storage media can be physically damaged, resulting in read errors when you try to access certain files. This is often recoverable. Even complete hardware failure does not mean the data is lost. The magnetic encoding of the data on the surface of the disk is probably 100% intact, though in this case you will probably need a data recovery service to repair the fault and make the disk readable again.
Data Recovery
So the data may still be there. How to go about recovering it? Data recovery is a time-consuming process, and using a data recovery service is consequently expensive. There may be no alternative to using a recovery service if the data is too important to risk losing it through a careless amateur recovery attempt, or if the drive that held it is not accessible at all. But in most cases data can easily be recovered using do it yourself data recovery software.
Data recovery tools used to be quite technical in nature, but you can now get data recovery utilities that can be used by the most non-technical of computer users. Such programs use familiar user interface concepts such as a “wizard” to walk you through the recovery process. All you need to do is tell the software where the data was held, wait while it scans the drive recovering files, and then examine the results, saving the files you want to keep to another drive.
If the data recovery software you choose doesn’t find your data, it is worth trying some different software. The most effective data recovery products are generally those you have to pay for. The best tools employ advanced algorithms to detect lost files where lesser tools miss them.
It’s normal with such tools that many files are recovered that contain rubbish. An algorithm can only go so far – it takes a human or the application that reads and writes that type of file to give the final verdict on whether it contains valid data. So you must be prepared to spend some time recovering your data.
With do it yourself data recovery software, losing important files from your computer is no longer the disaster it used to be, and recovering from the disaster need not be an expensive exercise.
Source:http://internetandcomputersecurity.com/do-it-yourself-data-recovery-2/
