There
is no need to panic when your disk drive fails or you cannot find an
important file. This article describes the common reasons for losing
data, and the best ways to recover it.
It's a sickening feeling, the moment you realise that some important
document, or irreplaceable photos have vanished from your computer. But
that is no reason to despair. The chances are that the data is still
present, even if you know you deleted it. Your computer operating
system just does not know how to find it any more.
The four most common reasons for data loss are:
* Deletion. You deleted the file by accident during a disk
cleanup, or because you thought it was no longer required. It is not in
the Recycle Bin. However, the data will still exist until the space it
occupied on the disk is are-used by another file.
* Overwriting. You saved a new file over the top of the old one. However, the old data may still exist, and be recoverable.
* File system corruption. The disk suddenly appears empty, or the file
and folder names contain gibberish. The files probably still exist, but
the pointers to them have been lost or corrupted and the operating
system cannot find them.
* Physical damage or hardware failure. You
receive error messages when you try to read the disk, or it is not
recognised by the computer at all. The data is still likely to be
present on the disk itself, but the drive is incapable of accessing it.
In each case, there is a good chance that the data still exists. The
computer operating system isn't able to see it, but data recovery
software may be able to. If the problem is a hardware failure then a
data recovery service may be able to get back the data using special
equipment.
Prepare for data recovery
There is one cardinal rule of data recovery: for the best chance of
recovering the files you must not write any new data to the disk they
were stored on. The old data will only remain on the disk until the
space it occupied is used by another file. If the disk is your
computer's main drive, then the drive is being written to all the time.
You should turn off the computer immediately, and use another computer
to search for a solution to recover your data. You should put your
computer's hard disk in another computer to do the data recovery, or
use data recovery that runs from a CD or floppy disk, because
installing the data recovery software on the drive could overwrite the
very data you want to recover.
Choosing the data recovery method
Data recovery tools use different methods to try to recover data. Some
tools are designed for recovering deleted files, others are better at
restoring overwritten files, or recovering files from disks that are
physically damaged. Some data recovery software products have been
developed specifically for recovering photo images, or Microsoft Word
or Excel document files. Such products may succeed where others fail
because they understand what these files look like, and can recognise
their data when other clues to its existence have vanished.
It can be difficult to choose the most appropriate data recovery
method. Tech-Pro has created a website called Get Data Back. It has a
Data Recovery Wizard that asks questions about the data you have lost
and how it was lost, and then recommends the product that is most
likely to be successful. It will also advise you if it would be better
to use a professional data recovery service. Give the Get Data Back
data recovery site (http://www.get-data-back.com) a try if you need to
recover lost files.
