Lost Data: What Do You Do When It Happens To You

Most if not all forms of storage is susceptible to becoming damaged or corrupt. When your hard disk drives, CDs, DVDs or RAID arrays fail it is time to attempt recover your lost data. Data recovery describes the techniques implemented by IT professionals to salvage data that has been lost. Not only does it apply to drives that are physically or logically corrupt, data recovery is also used as a term to describe the process of retrieving and securing deleted information. Police departments and government agencies often uses these sorts of techniques for forensics purposes.

Usually the need for data recovery is because it has been accidentally deleted from the system. If this is the case, then normally most of the data can be recovered. But when data is lost due to physically damage or from malicious software, such as a virus, the chances of recovering your lost data goes down significantly. For simple data recovery, like for an accidentally deleted file, you can do-it-yourself by purchasing “Undelete” software. For physical damage, like what occurs when a computer is submerged in a flooded basement, it is best to contact a specialist to assist you.

If you decided to attempt to recover your data yourself on a physically damaged or corrupt drive you will need to keep a couple of things in mind. Do not allow your system to start up or run from the damaged drive. Instead, create a boot disk, boot from a USB stick drive, or use another hard drive to run the system from. Do not run the data recovery software from the drive needing repair. Again, try to run the software from some other source like a USB memory stick. Now a days, many operating systems come with a set of data recovery tools packaged with their installation programs. This can help make the job of recovering your lost data much easier. To find these tools, simply find your installation disks for your operating system and put the first disk in the computer. It should guide you from there.