Recovering Data
Recovering data has become a huge industry in the computer world, thanks to the notorious unreliability of hard drives. With an incredible number of people and organizations relying on hard drives, their failure can be a potential disaster. This is even more true in this age of terabyte drives, when the loss of a single disk can result in almost unimaginable amounts of information disappearing. This trend is only going to continue, and hardware reliability will perpetually lag far behind performance.
Hard drives are by their very nature fragile devices. Designed as a mechanical system, with many small moving parts, hard drives are often discussed in terms of lifetime. Most knowledgeable computer experts and technicians ask not if a hard drive will fail, but when. It pays to make regular back ups of important information, and in an ideal world this would make hard drive failures a minor problem. In the real world, however, backups can be months old or even non-existent. This can make the of a hard drive failure a real calamity.
Fortunately, however, such failures are not always indicative of a total loss. Recovering data can be done, even if a hard drive seems completely dead. The cause of the problem will end up determining how much can be rescued from the faulty device. If the problem was software related, it is very likely that almost all the data can be recovered. Hardware failures are much trickier, and can sometimes result in significant data loss.
Software related failures occur more frequently than you might think, with data corruption being the number one culprit. A single faulty bit in the wrong file can cause the entire operating system to stop working.
When you consider the extremely fragile nature of software, and combine that with the mechanical nature of hard drives, it’s surprising these problems don’t occur more frequently. Data corruption in a drive partition or system file usually spells disaster. Luckily, these problems can be reversed by several freeware utilities.
TestDisk is perhaps the most famous of these freeware utilities, and features a very comprehensive set of capabilities. Mount a failed drive to another computer, and place TestDisk on that system’s hard drive. Run TestDisk against the failed drive, and it will inform you of the cause if it can. If the problem is software related, TestDisk stands a good chance of recovering data. A hardware failure, however, will probably require an expensive service such as DriveSavers.
DriveSavers offers a quick and high quality service, but their prices are very steep. If the data you have on the failed disk is very important, then DriveSavers offers just about the best chance you are going to find of recovering data. Be prepared to pay several hundred dollars, however, when using a service such as DriveSavers.
Filed under: Recovering Data