Hard Drive Data Recovery Guide

If you work with computers regularly, which almost everyone in the world seems to do these days, you must have felt the need to recover data from your hard drive one time or another. Such situations arise rarely, with the result that hard drive data recovery seems like an arcane art that is best left to the professionals. This is quite far from the truth, which is that recovering data from hard drive can be as simple as recovering files from your recycle bin, as long as you have the right tools and the right information.

The main fact to keep in mind when seeking to recover lost data is that you do not want to overwrite your data with something else. Therefore, once you have a hard drive in need of data recovery, you should not write or store files in it. In doing so, you may inadvertently overwrite the data you seek to recover. That would make data recovery impossible. Taking this fact in mind, we will go over the two major types of data recovery requirements.

Hard Drive Data Recovery After Deletion

In Windows Operating System, depending on the settings of your recycle bin, a deleted file is first moved to the recycle bin. Under another setting, the deleted file is deleted from the file system, without moving it to the recycle bin. In case the file is in recycle bin, recovering it is trivial – you can just go to the recycle bin, right click the file, and click Restore. However once you empty your recycle bin, then you cannot just restore a file like that.

In that case, you can still recover your file. When Windows says that it has completely deleted a file, it just means that it has removed the entry of the file from the file system – the data of that file, or the file itself, usually remains on the hard disk. A number of tools will help you recover such a file by analyzing your disk, and then finding all the recoverable files. Once they have found the recoverable files, you can choose the ones you want to recover, and presto, your file has been recovered. You can find such tools at cnet.com under section “data recovery”.

Image via Wikipedia

The same principle applies to Mac users too, there are tools that will help you recover deleted and lost files very easily.

Hard Drive Data Recovery From Crashed Hard Drive

It is trickier to recover data from a crashed drive, but by no means is it impossible. Hard drives can get corrupted in different ways. If you delete a partition by mistake, then all the data in that partition will become inaccessible to you. The solution here is to use a partition recovery software, and use it to recover the lost partition.

The worst case scenario is when your hard drive is physically damaged. In such a situation, you may not be able to recover your data by yourself; this is the time to get expert help. You can contact Seagate’s i365, Iomega or the manufacturer of your hard disk and ask them to recover whatever they can from your disk. However, there is no guarantee that you will get your data back, and these services cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars.

Hard drive data recovery is not the toughest nut to crack once you know how to do it. Most of the time, the steps required to do it can be as simple as downloading a software, and using it to recover lost data. Only in the rarest of the cases of hard drive data recovery will you need to pay for a software or expert help .

Erwin Bauer

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