If you lose your computer’s data, for whatever reason, you are likely to be very upset. These files may have contained financial data, photographs, personal information, and so on. Losing them is devastating, therefore. Luckily, once lost, it isn’t necessary gone forever. Rather, you should contact professional data recovery services to help you get the lost things back.
Data Recovery Can Be Done
When you store a file on your computer, it is written on the hard drive. This drive is made up of specific components, using a magnetic storage medium. If you delete something, it doesn’t get erased. Rather, changes are made so that the space on which it was is marked as “vacant” rather than “occupied”. This means that, until your computer actually uses that space again, the info is still there. However, even if your computer does use the space, then it can still be recovered. The original file will have left some traces, and this can be reassembled with professional helps. The more often it is overwritten, the harder it gets to get it back, however.
What Does a Data Recovery Expert Do?
Once you get in touch with a data recovery service, they need to know how you lost your data. This could be anything from a fire to a hard drive crash. They will then inspect your drive, which means you need to get it to them, and they can then inspect it. After that, they will be able to give you a quote. If you decide to go ahead, they will make a full copy of your drive so that, if they were to make a mistake, nothing is lost.
In fact, the company will get to work on the drive’s copy, using various techniques and tools to get hold of the data. They will look at the old tables of content that are found, matching it with what is visible on the drive, and recovering what was lost. Once they have recovered everything, they will run a second check to make sure they haven’t missed anything. This is then stored onto a new device, which is returned to you.
Alternatives to Data Recovery
There are a lot of other options out there that don’t involve going to a professional service. While these may be tempting, but they have some potential dangers associated with it as well. You may make a mistake, for instance, and end up doing more damage than good. So what are some of the options out there?
- Undelete software, whereby accidental deletions can be recovered. However, it is very much possible that simply downloading the undelete software means taking up the space that your deleted file used to take up, and you won’t be able to get it back without professional help then. You could, however, choose to download it to a separate drive, which avoids this problem.
- Fix and find corrupted files software. This has the same potential problem as with the undelete software, but even bigger because the file you want to find is corrupted, making it more likely for it to be overwritten.