Disaster Recovery
The data stored on your hard drive can be a precious resource, created through hours of hard work, and serving as a record of vital information. The frightening thing is that all of that data can be gone in the blink of an eye. Hard drive failures occur frequently, and eventually happen to almost all hard drives. If you have important information on your computer, such as financial, professional, or sensitive personal documents, you may want to consider making a backup copy of that data.
Hard drives are fragile mechanical devices, with parts that wear out over time. The “head” of the hard drive is moved around a magnetic platter by a small motor. Whenever a hard drive begins to click or make other erratic sounds, this is most likely because the motor is burning out, resulting in a read head that slides against the disk. Data should be immediately backed up if any strange noises like this are noticed.
Although prevention is the best policy, hard drives can sometimes die unexpectedly before the user has had an opportunity to backup their data. A hard drive that has crashed and will not boot the operating system must be taken to a professional data recovery service. Sometimes the cause of the crash does not affect the data, such as when the circuit board on the bottom of the drive fails. With a little luck, a data recovery service can replace the faulty part and bring the drive back to life long enough to restore the data. You can expect to pay at least $200 for this service.
Information that is accidentally deleted on a working hard drive is much easier to recover. In fact, many free utilities on the internet will actually recover such files. This is a simle task because of the way in which most operating systems handle file deletion. When the user deletes a file, it is not actually erased from the hard drive. The space on the drive representing that file is simply marked as “writable”, meaning that the drive has permission to overwrite that data. If caught early enough, most data can be fully restored even after it is emptied from the Recycle Bin.
Utilities like Undelete Plus make file restoration easy. Undelete Plus scans your hard drive and presents you with a sortable list of recoverable files that are still in good condition. There are a variety of other freeware tools on the internet that provide undelete services.
More advanced features, such as the ability to recover from a drive formatting or partition, may be available only in commercial versions of file recovery programs.
If you have vital information stored on your computer, be sure to back it up periodically. Although recovery services exist, they can be expensive, especially in the case of total drive failure.
Filed under: Hard Drive Recovery