Data Recovery - When It All Goes Wrong

Sometimes things go wrong. You do your best to keep your computer secure. You've installed locks, firewalls, anti-virus software and spyware cleaners. You take good care of your computer. Sometimes things just go wrong though and normally when that happens with a computer you end up losing all the data you've saved to your hard drive.

Most of you probably have no idea how valuable that data is. It's like most things in life - you never understand how valuable anything is to you until it's taken away from you. The data in your computer is probably an awful lot more valuable to you than you realize.

For those of you who keep data backups on an ongoing basis then data recovery is not something you'll ever really need to worry about. As long as your data sets are kept up to date then the biggest loss you'll suffer is maybe a few days worth of work. It's still a pain in the ass to lose any data at all but at least you can get back to work within a few hours of whatever caused the data loss.

For those of you who haven't kept backups of your important files then things may be a bit more complex. You'll need to use either data recovery software such as EasyRecovery Pro if the hard drive is still accessible or functioning. For the worst case scenarios you'll need to pay for the help of a data recovery specialist - expect to pay several hundred dollars for their services.

To figure out what your options are we need to look at two distinct possibilities here. One where the item or device storing the files is intact and accessible and one where the item or device is heavily damaged or destroyed.

Drive Is Intact
If the hard drive is still in one piece or powering on then you should be able to use data recovery software to grab back many of the files on the drive. How much of the data you can recover will really depend on how it was destroyed or deleted. If you deleted it by accident then you're probably going to be able to retrieve 75%+ of the files. If the data was destroyed by a virus then your success rate will drop to about 50% or less.

Drive Is Destroyed
If the hard drive or disc has been physically damaged or the motors or heads no longer work properly then the job of restoring the files from the disc becomes a lot more complicated straight away. In this case the job of getting your files back is best left to a professional data recovery service. Why? Opening up a hard drive is enough to destroy the sensitive disc or discs inside. Data recovery specialists cost a lot of cash but they'll be able to rescue most of the data from your hard drive - even if the drive was burned or found underwater!

Data recovery is an expensive business whether or not you use just software or an actual data recovery company. Then there is the added cost of the lost files themselves. It might have been business documents or just maybe just digital photos from your last holiday. Either way it's a loss of some kind.

The sad truth is that all data recovery problems can be solved by keeping computer backups in the first place - it's easy and most of the backup software runs automatically on a timer. It's silly not to have some kind of data backup plan!