Archive for the ‘Data Recovery’ Category
All is not Lost when a Hard Drive Fails
When a computer hard drive fails, all you have to do is pull out your ready back-up copies of all your important data and reload it onto your new hard drive. You did make regular backup copies, right? If you’re like most home computer users and a large percentage of business computer users, then the answer would be no, you don’t have recent backup copies of your important information. In that case you have two choices, reconstruct what you can from your own memory, or send the failed drive out to a data recovery house.
Trying to rebuild all your files and data from memory is obviously not going to work, and is completely impossible for media files such as photographs or video files that may have been stored on your hard drive. Sending your hard drive out for professional data recovery services, on the other hand is an effective way to recover data and files that have been lost due to a hard drive failure.
Data recovery from a damaged or failed hard drive can be performed by qualified professionals. The best data recovery houses will have hard drive manufacturers’ certifications authorizing them to open hard drives without voiding the warranty. That gives you a pretty good idea about the level of quality the data recovery house uses. If the manufacturer trusts them to handle their equipment properly, then you can, too.
Another thing to look for is the type of facility in which your hard drive or other storage media will be handled. These kinds of devices are highly susceptible to damage from foreign particulate matter that can get onto the drive surface and carve serious gouges out of the platter as it spins at high speed. Data recovery houses that open hard drives in a certified clean room can virtually eliminate the risk of foreign particles getting into your hard drive and damaging it further before your data can be extracted.
Files and data can be recovered not only from hard drives, but also from other non-volatile storage media that has becomes unreadable by ordinary methods. This includes SD cards, USB flash drives, and even CD-ROMs. Virtually anything that you store data on can be put through advanced data recovery processes by a professional service to pull files and data from it. The recovered data is then burned to a new CD, DVD, or even a new hard drive as specified by the customer, and then returned. Most data recovery houses can even recover data that was accidentally or even maliciously erased.
A policy of frequently backing up all of your important files and data can help prevent the need for a data recovery service, but if you are faced with a hard drive or other digital storage media failure, remember that all is not lost. Your data can still be extracted from the failed or damaged media by a reputable data recovery service.