Data Recovery

Data recovery is the process of recovering your data files after some kind of data disaster has occurred. The most common situation that requires data recovery is due to critical hard drive failure. There are also plenty of cases when viruses and trojans may attack your computer and render it unusable or causing significant loss of data through altering or deleting files, partition tables, or wiping out the entire hard drive in a few cases. There can be accidental file deletion by computer user, or software error causing overlapping or crosslinking of files, accidental power loss when files are opened etc. All these problems can can cause data disaster and in such situations, the importance of well performed data recovery can be critical for the business or person affected by the data loss.

In order to perform data recovery, we need first of all to understand what we are dealing with. If the problem has occurred on a hardware level, for example if a hard drive becomes faulty, the data recovery process should start immediately because chances are it will go much worse in a very fast manner. The first thing to do in such case is to backup the most important files you have, and then attempt to perform a full backup of the hard drive on another drive or DVD disks. The, use professional data recovery tools like the ones provided by Ontrack for example, to recover as much data as possible from your failed hard drive. Please also note that using these tools usually requires a lot of computer experience, in order to obtain best results. If you do not have such knowledge, better refer to a data recovery expert to do the task for you; this actually depends of the importance of the data, since such professional data recovery services can be very expensive, ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars per hard drive recovered. There are also professional data recovery labs that you can take your hard drive to, or even online data recovery services that can do the job for you.

If you believe data loss has occurred due to hacker attack for example, the first thing to do is to disconnect the affected computer from the Internet and/or local network, in order to prevent further damage. Then you should evaluate the situation thoroughly. If possible, use data recovery software to backup both existing and also recently deleted files to a separate drive. Such data recovery software has the ability of recovering information from damaged file systems, recover accidentally deleted files etc. Please note though that in most cases your data will be only partially recovered; files may be overlapping or new files written over your old deleted data and therefore it is likely to recover just a portion of your files. Also, data alteration may occur and recovered files may not contain all the information they once did, or in some cases they contain completely different data.

Thus being said, it is important to understand that data recovery is the last solution, and you should take all measures to prevent yourself from needing data recovery. First of all, backup your files as often as possible; daily would be perfect. Also, proper security measures will protect your computer from getting hacked in, and data from being altered by hackers or Internet based viruses and trojans. Always use good quality hardware, especially for hard drives, and change them when their expected lifetime has ended, otherwise they will fail one day and you will end up looking at ways to recover your data which will be difficult and very costly, and in some cases almost impossible. Finally, if you have ignored such advices and ended up in trouble, one thing you can do is to refer to data recovery experts to do the job for you, in order to recover as much data as possible which requires professional expertise and the right data recovery hardware and software tools.