Laptop Data Recovery Protects Your Important Information

The proliferation of laptops has brought the subject of hard drive data recovery back into the conversation for personal and business computers. Face it – your company’s desktop systems are tied into the network at all times. As long as you’ve set up a regular data backup and recovery system to run on your network, you can be fairly comfortably assured that the data stored on your desktop systems is essentially safe. That is – if the data on your company’s desktop systems is compromised, you’ll have backups to do restoration and get everything back up to full efficiency fairly quickly.

Your laptops, on the other hand, aren’t quite so easy to secure. In fact, every laptop you issue to employees represents a serious data loss risk for a number of reasons.

Because the laptops aren’t always connected to the network when your system is running backups, you’re far less likely to have a recent backup to use for data recovery if something compromises a laptop system.

If your employees travel with their laptops and use them in unsecured locations – airports, coffee shops and even hotel rooms – they’re more prone to hacking and software invasion.

Laptops are far more prone to the one kind of data loss that requires professional data recovery services – physical damage to the hard drive. The convenience and ease of traveling with a laptop carries with it the increased risk of damage to the machine. Laptops are carried around in and out of their cases, bumped against walls and doors, rattled as they ride around in vehicles and knocked off desks, tables and counters. Anyone of those jars, bumps or knocks can cause actual physical damage to the hard drive which results in data loss and necessitates the services of a data recovery company like Fields Associates.

Preventive Measures

There are, of course, a number of things you can do to decrease the chances of compromised data, data loss, hard drive damage and the need for a data recovery company among your company’s laptop users.

Every laptop should include a data backup utility that’s set to automatically back up the entire hard drive – or selected essential files – to the company servers and to offsite backup media on a regular basis. Your IT department should check those backups regularly to ensure that they’re being completed and that they contain the essential data.

Invest in heavy duty protective laptop cases for your entire fleet and require that laptops be transported in those cases.

Train all of your laptop users in how to recognize the signs of impending data loss and physical hard drive failure, and instruct them to immediately stop using their laptops if they notice any of those signs.

The last of those points is vital because continuing to use a hard drive after it shows signs of physical damage or impending failure risks destroying important data. If those instructions are followed by your employees, you increase the chances that a data recovery company will be able to retrieve any essential data from failed laptops.

Is Data Recovery The Right Option?

How do you decide whether to call in a data recovery company? When your computer fails and you can’t access important data, it’s easy to panic. Before you freak out and think that all is lost, there are a number of things you can do. If these steps fail, you can call in a data recovery company, such as Fields Associates or Fields Data Recovery.

Check Your Backups

If you have a backup routine, the first thing to do is to check your tape or disk backups. Depending on the routine your company follows, you may simply be able to restore the entire backup – onto a new hard drive, if possible, of course. Look for the most recent backup of the information and keep in mind that your backup won’t contain any modifications or entries after the date of the backup.

Even if you don’t do regular backups, all is not lost. Many times the important information you need may be stored elsewhere on the network or on another hard drive. If you only need one or two important files, you may be able to find them that way.

Recreating the Lost Data

Is the lost data in files that can be recreated? If the files are relatively static, such as address databases, recreating the lost files may be a more affordable option than doing a full data recovery. Other files, however, could be impossible to recreate. If you’ve lost access to a database that registers dozens of transactions a minute – or even an hour – recreating the file from scratch is more than likely completely impossible. If the records are vital, sending the drive out to a data recovery company may be your only option.

Consider Legal Ramifications

In many businesses, your data may be necessary to comply with regulatory and legal requirements. In that case, data recovery may be your only viable option.

Choosing a Reliable Data Recovery Company

Choosing the right data recovery company is nearly as important as deciding whether or not you should opt to have your data recovered at all. It can be especially important if you need the data for regulatory purposes. The best way to ensure that you are dealing with a reliable data recovery firm like Fields Data Recovery is to do your homework in advance when you have the luxury of time to research the firm’s reliability. Once your hard drive has failed, you’re not likely to have the time to ask around and check a firm’s references before employing them.

Why Data Recovery Preparation Matters More Than Ever

In these days of automatic backups and inexpensive offsite storage – in the cloud and at other data centers – do you still really have to worry about finding the right data recovery company in case of emergency? We polled a number of IT specialists and received a single answer from the all – a resounding yes. Despite the fact that businesses are more aware than ever of the necessity for data security and doing regular backups, there’s always a chance that something will go wrong – and when it does, it often spells disaster.

What Could Go Wrong? How Companies Fail in Data Recovery Preparation

Even the most careful companies occasionally fail to cover something obvious, but by far the most common error that businesses make is the most basic one of all – failing to back up their data at all. We’ve all grown comfortable with the notion that the computer will always start up and the files will always be there. The more advanced the computer system, the more likely it is that the employees who use it never consider what might happen if an outage cut off their access to their data.

The data recovery stories that stand out, however, are those in which the company’s executive officers thought they’d covered everything – only to be undone by something – often something blindingly simple – that they’d overlooked. Even the best data recovery plans can fall apart when you make one of these basic mistakes.

Backing Up the Wrong Data

When the data server’s hard drive failed, the owner of one small company thought he had it covered. After all, he’d had his IT guy making nightly backups so he could do data restoration for just this kind of problem. Imagine his surprise when he ran the data recovery program and found that the recovery disks were missing the accounts receivable and projects databases – the two files most needed to continue operation without interruption.

Forgetting to Run the Backup Program

One small business made a significant investment in backup software that was designed to run nightly. The IT department surveyed the staff to figure out which files were most important and set up the scheduled backups according to order of importance. When a virus compromised the data on the network hard drive, the data team when into action – only to find that the data tech who’d set up the program had neglected to complete the final step in configuring the program. The backup program had never run, and the company had to call in a Fields Data Recovery team to try to resurrect their missing files.

Those are just two of the many things that can go wrong even when you think you’re doing everything right. It’s always best to identify a data recovery option in advance so you’re not caught unprepared when the unexpected disaster strikes.

Choosing the Right Data Recovery Company

The very worst time to choose a data recovery company is when you’re in the middle of a data loss emergency. When your accounting department can’t pull up the customer list and your company’s work has ground to a halt because scheduling and planning software isn’t functioning, the last thing you want to be doing is calling random data recovery companies and evaluating which is the best one to handle your emergency. When you’re up against a wall, you’re vulnerable to unrealistic claims and sales pitches because you have to make a decision quickly.

Unfortunately, sending your drives and data to the wrong data recovery company can result in the permanent loss of your vital records. If you’re pressed to make a quick decision because your situation has already reached the emergency level, look for these factors to help you evaluate a number of data recovery companies before making your choice.

Look for a company that has a clean room – a sterilized environment in which the technicians can safely open drives and work directly on your damaged media. Without clean room support, the data recovery company can’t safely perform any physical procedures that might be needed to get your data back.

The best companies should be able to work on any type of software operating system. Be wary of data recovery firms that only work on Windows-based systems or Mac systems only. The more conversant the company is with recovery options for all types of systems, the better the chances are that they really know what they’re doing.

Physical proximity makes life easier for everyone, but don’t rule out a data recovery company just because they’re not located in the same area code as yours. Most data recovery companies can provide you with detailed instructions on how to safely ship your media to them, and many provide the packaging to ensure that your devices travel safely.

Make sure that the data recovery company you’re working with has a full service laboratory as well as a clean room. Get recommendations from others who have used them, and be wary of any company that doesn’t list a physical address and telephone contact information. The data recovery field is littered with “companies” that are no more than an amateur working in his basement – not exactly someone you want to trust to handle your sensitive data.

The best way to avoid having to make a data recovery decision in a hurry is to do your research in advance and identify a data recovery firm like Fields Associates to handle any data loss emergencies that might happen in the future.

Hard Drive Data Recovery: What to Do When Your Hard Drive Fails

Hard drive failure and data loss costs the average company from $500 to $2,500 per incident, with the higher end of the figure coming into play if the company had to call in an outside professional data recovery company. The most common cause of data loss leading to a need for data recovery is hard drive failure. Since hard drives have a limited life, hard drive failure is inevitable. If you plan carefully, though, hard drive failure doesn’t necessarily have to lead to data loss. These strategies can help you deal with hard drive data recovery and reduce the chances that you’ll need data recovery services from an outside company.

If a system hard drive fails to boot, immediately shut the computer down. If the data on the drive in question is critical to your firm and you have no backup, do not attempt to recover the data yourself. Any action you take carries the risk of making it impossible for even the best data recovery companies, such as Fields Data Recovery, to retrieve your files. Immediately contact a professional data recovery company to get instructions.

If, on the other hand, you can afford to lose the data on the drive, you can attempt some do-it-yourself data recovery options. Avoid using system software, such as chkdsk, to repair the file system, though. Most system recovery software is designed to repair your file systems, not preserve the data. There’s a good chance that the system will overwrite your data. If it’s not overwritten, it may be in chunked files that will take days to piece together.

Before you attempt any DIY data recovery operations, determine whether the disk failure is due to a software problem – deleted file, virus or operating system failure, for example – or a problem with the physical drive. If it’s software-related, you can attempt to recover the data using data recovery software. Before you do, though, remove the hard drive from the computer and install it in a USB enclosure to minimize disk utilization during boot and reduce the chances of causing more damage. Follow the instructions on your data recovery software. Again, if the drive contains mission-critical data, don’t even try this. Contact a pro data recovery service and hand the job over to them.

Do not open the drive case or attempt to swap the disk to a new drive. In either case, you risk destroying the drive and making it impossible to recover any data from the disk even for the best professional hard drive data recovery services.

If there are bad sectors on your drive, do not attempt to repair the bad sectors or read data from them with data recovery software. Either one may overwrite the underlying data or destroy it entirely.

Never attempt to power up a system that has suffered physical damage from water, fire, electrical failure or vandalism. Instead, contact a professional data recovery company to do the job for you.

Avoiding the Need for Data Recovery ServicesData

Data recovery, particularly recovering data from solid state hard drives and RAID hard drives, can be an expensive and time consuming process. These days, with the ease of setting up automatic backups and offsite storage performed over the Internet, there should be little need for data recovery services, but the professional data recovery companies like Fields Data Recovery still thrive. Unforeseen things happen, but most data recovery emergencies seen by professional data retrieval firms could have been avoided by taking a few simple steps.

Prioritize Your Data

With the enormous amount of data that most computers collect over the course of a day, it’s not always practical to back up every bit of data on every computer every day. Identify the files and databases that are the most vital to your company’s processes, as well as those most likely to change daily or more often, and mark them for the most thorough backups, at least once daily. That way your most important company information will never be more than 24 hours out of date. Less sensitive data can be backed up weekly, and you can schedule full backups at less frequent intervals during the year. By prioritizing data and scheduling backups according to importance, you’ll be able to get your most vital operations up and running again as soon as possible after an emergency or outage.

Check Your Backups

One of the most common errors that the technicians at Fields Data Recovery and other companies like them see is a failed backup. Automated backups do you no good at all if they’re not functioning properly. Don’t just assume that everything is working well. Do regular checks to make sure that your data is actually being backed up as expected. The last thing you need is to try to restore from a backup only to find that your automated process stopped functioning weeks ago.

Identify a Data Recovery Company

Identify a data recovery company before you need one. Even if you have complete faith in your backup routine and are certain that you’ll always be able to restore your backup files yourself, it’s always best to be prepared. Do your homework in advance so that you know exactly where to turn if the unthinkable happens and you need to call in a professional to attempt to restore your files and other important data.

You can insulate yourself from most data risks by initiating and following a regular data backup program that backs up your most important data for retrieval in case of an emergency. Sometimes, though, you may need to call in a professional data recovery firm like Fields Data Recovery to get your business back into operation as quickly as possible

How to Evaluate Data Recovery Services

The very last time in the world that you want to be evaluating data recovery services is when you’re in desperate need of them. Let’s face it. When you’re sitting there with a pancaked hard drive that contains business files that are essential to your company, you’ll believe anyone who tells you that they can get those files back for you – tomorrow. Decisions made in panic mode aren’t always the best.

That’s why the best time to find a data recovery company to work with is before you need one. In fact, identifying a reliable, honest and good data recovery service should be part of your disaster recovery plan – and yes, a disaster recovery plan should be an essential part of your IT security. Your disaster recovery plan should identify how you back up your data, where you store the backup files and how you’ll restore them in the event of a corrupt drive, a fire or any other disaster that makes it impossible for you to access your essential files. It should also identify the data recovery company you’ll contact in the event that your own data retrieval efforts fail. Choosing the right data recovery service to work on your files is an essential part of the process.

Ask around among other professionals. Most IT professionals have had to deal with data loss at one time or another in their careers. Ask professions you respect who they’d send their own most sensitive data to if they needed the services of a professional data retrieval firm.

Check out the reputations of the companies suggested online. A thorough Google search of the company’s name with +complaints will turn up any complaints and problems against the company and give you an idea of how reliable they are.

Pick up the phone and contact the companies you’ve identified. Let them know up front that you’re identifying data recovery professionals for your disaster recovery plan and ask to speak to a technician or sales rep. Determine if they have clean room facilities for opening hard drives for hard drive data recovery, and propose a few scenarios to ask how they’d handle the situation.

While your budget is important, price shouldn’t be your primary consideration when weeding out data recovery firms. Ask about prices and capabilities as a means to compare the company with others that you contact, but put more weight in the answers they give you to your possible scenarios and your other questions.

Once you’ve chosen a data recovery firm, follow their instructions for handling various data emergencies and write them into your disaster recovery plan. It’s important that everyone in your company is aware of the steps to take in a data loss emergency.

Improbable Data Recovery Tales

We all like to believe that we’re good about backing up data and we’ll never need data recovery services to save us from the error of our ways. Ask any data recovery technician, though, and he’ll tell you the truth. He’s also likely to share with you some of the wackiest and oddest tales of data mishaps he’s ever had to deal with. Here are just a few of the improbable data restoration tasks that technicians have had to deal with.

When the Life Link helicopter took off from the hospital roof, no one thought to check to make sure that all the equipment was carefully secured. Somehow in their hurry to get off to an emergency, one of the techs failed to secure a laptop computer on one of the copter’s skids. What goes up must come down and the laptop was no exception. It slid off the skid after the helicopter was airborne, bounced off a garage roof and smashed to pieces on the driveway of a suburban Minnesota home. The family called the hospital, the hospital called a data recovery service and amazingly, the technicians were able to retrieve all the important data from the smashed hard drive.

Here’s a packing tip from one unlucky businessman who desperately needed the information on his laptop computer for a morning meeting. Always pack your shampoo safely away from your laptop. In a rush to make his flight, the businessman shoved his laptop into his carry-on without thinking twice. When he pulled it out to work on something during the flight, he found it soaked with sticky, slick shampoo. Data recovery technicians gave a whole new meaning to the phrase “data washing” when they carefully cleaned all of the laptop components to get the drive up and working – with no data loss!

Academics have a reputation for being book smart but – well, you know the rest. A professor at a prestigious university was frustrated with the squeaky squeal coming from inside his computer, so he opened up the case and sprayed the offending device with WD-40 to stop the squeak. It may work with door hinges, but hard drives, not so much. A data recovery company had to open the drive up and carefully clean away the gunk with a solvent before the techs could recover his important research data – which, he had not backed up to anything, of course.

You don’t have to have an interesting story for the techs at Fields Data Recovery to take your problem seriously. You’ll get the same excellent service whether you dropped your computer off the Grand Canyon or simply knocked it off your desk. The fact is that no one is as good about backing up their devices as they claim, and when it comes to data recovery services, people expect miracles. Luckily, the good folks at companies like Fields Associates frequently manage to deliver those miracles.

Data Recovery in Windows 7Recovery

Backing up your data regularly is an important part of data security – keeping your files secure so that you can always access them when you need them. While most people understand how to back up their files, getting the files you need from a backup is a different story. Data recovery is the other part of a data security plan, and Windows 7 makes it easy for you to recover your files from a backup, as long as your hard drive is accessible and in good condition.

Before you begin, however, here’s a fair warning. Just about anything you do with your hard drive carries the possibility of wiping out the data you’re trying to restore, or wiping out other data you may not realize is in danger yet. If your hard drive data recovery job involves vital files or data that is impossible to retrieve from any other source, don’t attempt the job. Instead, contact a professional data recovery firm, such as Fields Data Recovery, which has the tools, capabilities and experience to recover data from a drive in any condition.

Recovering Data in Windows 7 Without Using the Backup

If you’ve used Windows for any length of time, you know that there are several ways for you to retrieve files that were accidentally deleted, erased or damaged. They include:

Recover The File From The Recycle Bin

When you first delete a file, it goes to live in the Recycle Bin, where it will stay until you empty the Recycle Bin. It’s the first place to check if your file is missing. If you find it there, just right-click on the filename and click “Restore” to return the missing file to its rightful place.

Restore The File From a Previous Version

Windows 7 has a little known and wonderfully powerful utility called Restore Previous Version. You can use it on individual files or file folders to recover data from previous versions that were saved during a restore point back up. To use RPV for data recovery, right-click on the folder where the file should be. Click on “Restore Previous Version” to open a dialog box. The box will contain a list of previous versions of the file folder. You have the option to open a previous version or restore it. Open the previous version, locate the file you need and open that file, then save it to a new location.

In addition, you can attempt data recovery from a backup file or from a system image. In many cases, though, data recovery is a job for the pros. If you’re not sure about what you’re doing, if your computer hard drive is making funny noises or if your hard drive is inaccessible, contact a data recovery firm that specializes in retrieving and restoring data from failed hard drives.

When Is Data Recovery a Do-It-Yourself Job?

It’s never fun to try to open a file and find that it’s not where it should be, or that an error prevents it from opening. It’s even worse when you can’t even get your computer to recognize the hard drive. Data recovery firms deal with both of these situations frequently, and in many cases, they do things that you can do at home yourself. At the same time, according to Fields Data Recovery experts, attempts to recover data by computer users often makes it more difficult, if not impossible, for a data recovery company to retrieve data they might have been able to access if the computer’s owner hadn’t tried to do it himself at home. With that in mind, when is it safe to try to restore your files and data yourself?

Logical Hard Drive Failures vs. Mechanical Failures

There are two types of hard drive failures – logical failures, which encompass just about anything that can go wrong with the software, and physical failures, which happen when something physically damages the hard drive. The type of hard drive data recovery you can attempt depends on which type of failure you’re facing. If you believe that your hard drive may be physically damaged, recovering the data is never a do-it-yourself job.

But how do you know the difference?

Generally, you listen to your hard drive. If you turn your computer on and you can’t hear the hard drive spinning up, chances are that you won’t be able to do a DIY data recovery job on it. It means that something has gone wrong with the mechanics of the drive and there’s no way to get to the data without opening it up and accessing the disks directly. That requires a clean room and often, proprietary recovery techniques. Before you call on a data recovery company, though, there is one thing you can try if you’re comfortable working inside your computer and have access to a second computer or a second hard drive. Swap out the existing hard drive for a different one. If the second hard drive spins up and runs, then the problem is with your hard drive.

You’re also listening to your hard drive for any unusual noises that may hint at physical damage to the drive. If you hear clicking, grinding, whining, groaning or any other odd noises, there’s a high probability that your hard drive is failing mechanically. If the drive is still accessible, back up all of its contents to another drive and replace the hard drive. A data recovery company would always prefer to work with a backup copy of your hard drive than on the actual drive because it reduces the chance that they’ll overwrite data that they’re trying to recover. If it happens with a backup copy, you’ll still have the original hard drive to work from.

Finally, if the data on your drive is mission-critical and irreplaceable, never attempt a DIY data recovery operation. When the risk is that high, turn to a professional data recovery company, such as Fields Associates, that you can trust to recover as much data as possible from your failed drive.

Data Recovery Tips to Prevent and Minimize Data Loss

When you lose data from your hard drive or any other data storage device, the first steps you take can be critical to the data recovery process. Doing the right thing when you can’t access your hard drive or can’t find or open an important file can make the difference between losing the information in the file permanently or being able to retrieve your file. Even if you turn to a data recovery firm, such as Fields Associates, you can make their job easier, which makes data recovery more likely and more affordable. These tips from Fields Data Recovery can greatly increase the chances that they’ll be able to get your lost files back.

If Your Drive Is Making Noises:

If you hear a clicking, grinding or groaning noise from your computer, shut it down immediately. The sound could be caused by the read/write heads of your hard drive tapping on or dragging over the metal disks that hold the data you save. If the heads scrape or scratch the disks, you could lose the data recorded in those areas permanently. Depending on what’s recorded there, it could compromise your ability to access anything else on your drive.

Hard drive noises nearly always signal physical or mechanical failure. While it’s relatively easy to recover data that’s been compromised by a logical error, recovering data from a drive that’s failed physically is a job for a professional data recovery company like Fields Data Recovery. If your computer is making funny noises that seem to be coming from the hard drive, follow these steps.

Shut down your computer immediately, following proper shutdown procedures. Simply powering off can cause even more damage because it fails to “park” the heads properly.

Unplug the power to the computer and discharge any static electricity before opening the cover and touching anything inside. Be very careful when handling the hard drive to avoid damage from static electricity or physical jarring or shock.

Choose a reputable data recovery firm like Fields Associates to handle your data recovery job. The first attempt to recover data from a physically damaged drive is the most critical. A firm that doesn’t know what it’s doing can not only fail to recover any data, but also make it impossible for other data recovery pros to retrieve anything at all.

Contact the data recovery firm to get instructions on shipping your drive to them, and follow their instructions to the letter. The best companies will provide you with the materials you need to safeguard your drive in transit, or perform onsite recovery.

The best way to safeguard the information on your computer is to prevent the need for data recovery by backing up your computer files regularly. If something goes wrong, though, be sure that you choose the best data recovery firm for your needs.

Can You Trust Your Data Recovery Company?

A couple of years ago, a major U.S. data recovery company doing work for the U.S. government wondered what sort of security standards the Feds set for their data recovery contractors. Much to their surprise, they found that essentially, the various agencies of the federal government had standards for performance and cost, and while some agencies had an established security vetting procedure, there was no overall standard for data recovery security. Once they brought it to the attention of the powers that be in the federal government, that was remedied with this single paragraph in a publication from the National Institutes of Standards and Technology:

“Organizations may use third-party vendors to recover data from failed storage devices. Organizations should consider the security risk of having their data handled by an outside company and ensure that proper security vetting of the service provider is conducted before turning over equipment. The service provider and employees should sign non-disclosure agreements, be properly bonded and adhere to organization-specific security policies.”

When you choose a data recovery company, do you consider the security of your recovered data in making the choice? According to the data recovery company who originally raised the issue with the U.S. government, very few people consider it all – and if they do, it’s usually at the bottom of their priority list. Usually, when an organization has suffered a data disaster, their first consideration is speed, followed by the company’s record of data recovery. If you handle secure data at all – customer information, in particular – data security should be your first consideration, not your last.

Data Recovery as Part of a Risk Management Plan

If your business counts on computers and data for any essential function, your risk management plan must include a plan for data recovery, and your plan should include identifying the data recovery vendor you’ll use in case you need to retrieve lost data or attempt to restore a failed hard drive.

Choosing the right data recovery company should include a thorough vetting to make sure that your data will be safe in their hands. By identifying a company in advance, you allow yourself the time and luxury to choose a data retrieval service that meets all of your expectations and needs. You’ll be making your choice at a time when speed isn’t as important as it will be if your hard drives fail or your computers are compromised by a virus or a physical disaster.

When choosing a data recovery company, look beyond the typical claims of fast recovery and low cost to be sure that the data recovery company you choose will handle your data with the same care you take with it. You owe it to yourself and your customers to choose a reputable data recovery company, such as Fields Data Recovery, which will ensure that your important information and data stays in safe and secure hands.

Do You Need a Data Recovery Service?Data

Everyone faces lost files, crashed hard drives and other data recovery emergencies at one point or another. Some data problems can be fixed with a DIY data recovery solution, while others require the services of a data recovery professional. Sometimes, you need a data recovery service even if your drive seems to be limping along just fine. Do you know which data errors and faults you can fix yourself and which require the services of a data recovery professional?

DIY Data Recovery

If you accidentally deleted a file, but your hard drive is humming along with no problems, you can usually retrieve the lost file yourself. If it’s not in your Recycle Bin for one reason or another, follow these steps as soon as you realize the error to avoid overwriting the sectors where the file is stored.

Stop using the drive immediately. Turn off the computer to keep any background processes from running – they may write data to the disk and overwrite the data you want to recover.

Download and run data recovery software from another drive, such as a USB flash drive.

If your hard drive boots up but it won’t load your operating system, a DIY data recovery solution may be possible if you’ve been vigilant about doing regular backups. You should be able to do a disk restore from a backup and get your hard drive up and running again.

If you turn on your computer and get the message that your hard drive isn’t found, or that it has errors, replacing the hard drive before it fails completely can avoid the need to call in a data recovery expert. Replace the hard drive and follow the installation instructions to restore a backup of your old hard drive to the new drive and you should be fine.

When You Need a Data Recovery Professional

There are other times when DIY recovery attempts will just make things worse. Contact a data recovery specialist like Fields Data Recovery (Fields Associates) if you have any of the following problems.

The hard drive won’t spin up or boot at all. The problem may be a mechanical failure of the drive. If that’s the case, your files are completely inaccessible through software means and you’ll need to call in an expert who can access the drive disks directly.

The hard drive clicks or groans when you turn on your computer or while the computer is running. In this case, the problem is almost definitely mechanical and you’re facing imminent disk failure. A data recovery expert has ways to access the drive without risking further data loss.

Your hard drive has been physically damaged by smoke, water or trauma. Running the hard drive after it’s damaged practically guarantees that you’ll make matters worse. A professional data recovery operation can open the disk in a clean room and attempt to recover the data that way.

If you do need to turn to the professionals, be sure to choose a data recovery company, such as Fields Data Recovery, that has an excellent reputation for delivering good results

Tips to Help Avoid the Need for Data Recovery on Your RAID Array

In today’s business environment, a redundant data array is almost a necessity to increase your computer’s efficiency and speed. When you go to the trouble and expense of setting up a hardware RAID array to make your computers more efficient and accurate, it would be foolish to stop short of protecting yourself from future data loss. Taking these steps now can help you avoid the need to call in a professional data recovery firm in the future.

Save Your Old Hard Drives Until You’re Sure You Won’t Need the Original Data

Often, you’ll be copying information onto your new array from an old hard drive or hard drives. Hold onto the hard drives until you’re certain that the data is securely transferred to your new RAID array and that the whole system is operating properly. If errors or faults crop up in the first few weeks, you’ll still have the original data to work from.

Back Up Your RAID drives Regularly to Tape

Using a RAID array doesn’t absolve you from the need to do regular backups. It’s still just as important to back up your data so you can recover it if something happens to the physical drives or your business. Backing up your drives to tape will make it far easier to restore your data than if you have to bring in an expert data recovery technician to resurrect your RAID.

Do Regular Performance Tests on Your Machines

Far too often, a disk in an array fails and no one notices because the array does what it’s supposed to do – reconstruct the missing data from the other drives in the RAID. Unless someone notices and steps in to repair or replace the damaged disk and restore the data it holds, the system will keep working until a second drive fails and the whole system grinds to a halt. At that point, with the entire system inaccessible, your only safe option is to call in a RAID data recovery specialist.

Don’t Try to Fix an Inaccessible RAID Array

The first reaction many inexperienced techs have when the files on a RAID drive become inaccessible is to try to fix the problem. Unfortunately, that’s almost always the wrong thing to do. Almost anything you do to fix the situation can result in the permanent loss of your important data. If things have gotten to this point, you have no choice but to call in a data recovery specialist to prevent erasing important data from your drive.

It’s always best to prevent data loss, or to plan for an easy restoration of data by backing up your data regularly. Sometimes, though, there’s no other choice but to call in experienced data recovery specialists like those at Fields Data Recovery to recover the data from your failed drives and restore it for your use.

Answers To Frequent Data Recovery Questions

Data recovery companies like Fields Data Recovery are among the best sources of information when things go drastically wrong with your hard drive. If your computer is having some odd symptoms, or if you’re wondering whether you should call in a pro data recovery company, the answers to the questions that the techs get asked more often can help you decide.

What Does It Mean If My Hard Drive Is Making a Clicking Sound?

If you try to boot up your computer and your hard drive just clicks repeatedly, your hard drive has an internal problem that most people can’t fix at home. Shut your computer down, pull the drive out and send it to a data recovery service if it has data on it you can’t afford to lose.

When I Turn My Computer On, the Hard Drive Makes a Loud Grinding Noise. Can I Fix It?

It sounds like there’s a problem with the read/write heads on your hard drive. The grinding sound you hear is the head dragging over the surface of your drive. Turn your computer off and don’t turn it back on – it will just make things worse. A data recovery company with a clean room may be able to recover some of your data for you.

My Computer Won’t Boot and It Looks Like the Whole Partition Is Missing. Are My Files Gone for Good?

Chances are good that a professional data recovery company can get your files back for you. If your computer won’t boot up, though, don’t try to recover the files yourself. There’s too great a chance that you’ll destroy more data. Contact a company that recovers data from hard drives and get instructions on how to package your hard drive and send it to them.

I Heard That I Can Un-stick My Hard Drive by Giving It a Shake or a Thump When It Won’t Spin Up. Will That Work?

The short answer is no. The components inside your hard drive are delicate and delicately calibrated. Shaking the drive or banging on it is a good way to cause physical damage to the disk and make it harder to recover any data that’s on the disk.

I Know It Was Stupid, But I Reinstalled My OS from Scratch Without Doing a Backup. Is There a Chance for Data Recovery?

There’s always a chance. A professional data recovery company has access to tools and specialized software that can get at any data that remains on your disk. There’s a lot more left than you think.

If you’ve suffered a hard drive crash or data loss, a data recovery company can be your best friend. You can usually get an estimate of the cost and time required to get at your data by calling a professional recovery firm and asking them about your situation.

Data Recovery Horror Stories And What You Can Learn From Them

Data recovery professionals, like those at Fields Data Recovery, hear all sorts of horror stories about crashed hard drives, dropped cell phones and digital cameras left out in the rain. Each of these data recovery horror stories provides a valuable lesson you can glean – after you stop laughing. Just keep in mind that data loss can happen to anyone, and when it does, the things you do can ensure whether Fields data recovery can get your lost files back for you.

Data Recovery Oops!

One huge Fortune 500 firm thought they’d covered all the bases. They purchased a top of the line UNIX network, instituted daily backups and hired an entire department to manage network services. Somehow, they forgot to include a system to which the backed up data could be restored. Oops!

Lesson One: Make sure you have all the pieces in place.

People Make Things Worse When They Don’t Know What to Do

When the server for a large hospital went down, the system operators didn’t immediately recognize what was happening. As little errors began infiltrating the network, they immediately jumped into repair mode instead of gathering data to diagnose the problem. Their attempts to fix the problem ended up erasing all the data on the RAID system that had been installed to ensure that the data would be available if the main system failed.

Lesson Two: Educate your staff on data recovery processes.

Standardization Exists for a Reason

Businesses that try to do things on the cheap often end up with data recovery problems that are next to impossible to fix. One firm thought they’d save money by purchasing a big-name server system from an off-label dealer. The system manager did the configuration himself rather than adhering to industry standards. When the system failed, the company ended up shelling out big bucks to a data recovery firm to extract their inaccessible data.

Lesson Three: Stick to standard procedures if you DIY your system. It will make data recovery easier in the event you need it.

Keep Your Backups in a Safe Place

One company went to great lengths to make sure that all their data was backed up daily. They laid out the bucks for a top-of-the-line automatic backup system to back up every transaction immediately. Unfortunately, they located the backup server in the same room as the rest of their system. When a plumbing disaster flooded the room, both systems were fried, requiring the services of a data recovery firm.

Lesson Four: Always keep your backups offsite.

Always Test Your Data Recovery System

A local IT firm – who really should have known better – set up a “foolproof” tape backup system to back up all their customer files daily. They went about their daily business for months, never giving the backups a second thought since they were being done automatically. When their main system failed, they discovered the awful truth. The backup system they’d depended upon hadn’t actually run for months because of a mechanical problem with the server. Instead of the quick restore they’d planned, they had to send out their main disk to a data recovery firm.

Lesson Five: Test your backups regularly to catch any problems before they become a major issue.

Data loss happens despite the best efforts of companies to avoid or prevent them. No matter what the reason for your data mishap, chances are the data recovery firm has already dealt with it or something even funnier.

Choose A Data Recovery Firm Carefully

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, you end up in a situation where you need to call a data recovery service. It may be because your hard drive or other data device is too physically damaged to access or because a file backup failed to restore, but whatever the reason, you find yourself with an inaccessible hard drive and files that you need to pull off that drive. It’s a job for experts in data recovery – but how do you choose which data restoration service to use? These tips can help you weed through the thousands of data recovery firms available to find the one that works best for your company.

Get Recommendations for Data Recovery

If you want to use a local firm, check with business associates who may have had to use a data recovery service in the past. People you know are the best source of recommendations, but turn to other professionals as well. If you work with a firm that repairs your PCs, for example, ask them who they’d use in your situation. The more knowledgeable they are about the process of restoring data, the more you can trust their recommendation for a data recovery service.

If you’d rather not air your data problems in public – especially locally – try asking for recommendations in a professional online forum where you can be anonymous.

Ask for Quotes

Once you’ve identified several data recovery services, submit a request for a quote to recover your files. Describe the problem as completely as you can. Include the specifications of the drive on which the files reside, including brand name and model number, size and the number and types of files you need to restore, as well as an honest description of what happened. If you’ve made attempts to recover the data, be sure that you let the data recovery company know exactly what you did. All of this will help the firm give you an accurate estimate of how long it will take and how much it will cost to attempt the recovery.

Warning Signals

Be wary of any data recovery firm that guarantees that it will recover all of your missing files without any qualifiers. Data recovery is a tricky process, and no one can guarantee 100 percent success without examining the drive first. An honest firm will usually include a caveat that they may not be able to recover all of your files.

Always check the reputation of the data recovery firm before you engage them. Many firms advertise high success rates and low prices, but if you run a search online you’ll find multiple complaints about their poor service and results. Take the time to research the best data recovery services to make sure that you get the services that you need.

Evaluating Data Recovery Services

Your drive has pancaked, and you’ve determined that there’s no way for you to get to your files yourself. Your only option is to call in a professional data recovery service, but you’ve heard horror stories about data pros who charge a fortune and return nothing at all. How do you find a good data recovery service that you can trust to recover your precious data – without handing over both arms and a leg to get it done? These tips can help you find a good professional data recovery service, such as Fields Data Recovery.

Ask for Recommendations  

Chances are that someone you know has faced a similar dilemma, but you’ll have to ask to find out. Most people don’t like to advertise that they failed to back up important data and had to turn to a data recovery service to retrieve it. If you’re in that position yourself, you probably understand exactly how they feel. In fact, there’s a good chance that you’re hesitant to bring it up because, honestly, it’s a little embarrassing to admit that you didn’t take basic precautions to safeguard your data. You’re not alone. If you were, there would be no real need for data retrieval services. So… put your embarrassment aside and ask around for recommendations from people you trust. It’s the best way to find a service you can trust with your data loss problem.

Search for a Local Data Recovery Service

If you live in a good-sized city, there’s a good chance there’s a facility in town that does data retrieval. There are a number of good reasons to choose a local pro to deal with your hard drive data recovery. First, you can save the cost of postage and insurance – which you’ll definitely want if you have to ship your drive to someone – by working with a local service. You can drop the drive off yourself, or send it by messenger. Second, and more important, especially if your drive is completely dead, you’ll have a chance to see the facilities. The best data recovery services have a “clean room,” a room where they can open sealed drives safely without concern about static, dust and other particles that can damage the information that may still be on your drive.

Search Online for Information

If there’s no data recovery service nearby, do an Internet search for one – but be sure to do your homework well. Hard drive data recovery can be quite expensive because it’s highly skilled and time-consuming work, and you don’t want to trust it to just anyone. Look for contact information, check with the Better Business Bureau in their state or city, and do a web search for their name and the word “complaints” to turn up any complaints about that service.

Once you find a data recovery service you can trust, call them to get a quote on the price to recover the files on your drive.

Data Recovery Options for Mac Users

Mac users aren’t exempt from computer troubles, no matter what Apple would have you believe. While Macs aren’t as troubled by viruses (there have been a few encountered in the wild recently), there is still physical damage and accidental deletions to contend with. Luckily, there are data recovery options for Mac users as well as for PC users.

There are three basic options for Mac hard drive data recovery, each of them with varying degrees of difficulty and success. If you’ve misplaced files on your Mac or can’t access important data on your Mac hard drive, these options may help you with data recovery.

The easiest way to recover files from your Mac drive is to restore it from the most recent backup. Just as it’s important for PC users to back up their files regularly, Mac users should take advantage of daily file backup programs and utilities. If something goes wrong with your hard drive, you can simply pull your missing files from the backup. There are a number of backup utilities for Mac that you can use to set up regular, timed backups that won’t interfere with your daily use of your computer.

Recovering files from a backup is a good option for nearly any situation where you lose data, even having your computer stolen. As long as you have a backup, you can restore your old files to your new computer. Of course, we all know how easy it is to forget to make those backups, or to put it off until disaster happens – and then it’s too late.

The second option for hard drive data recovery for a Mac is to use software designed to recover files from a Mac. Unfortunately, there are fewer options for Mac users than there are for PC users, and there’s no guarantee of success. In most cases, if you can access the hard drive but can’t open files, a data restoration utility may help you. Always be sure to run the recovery or rescue program from another drive to avoid accidentally overwriting the files you are trying to recover.

This option is a reasonable choice if you accidentally deleted a file and realized it shortly afterward, before the sectors where the file is stored have been overwritten.

For more difficult data recovery problems, your only option may be to call in the pros. Many data recovery companies, such as Fields data recovery, have great success retrieving files from Macs. In many cases, the company will require you to send them the actual drive or device, but in some cases, they can work with a backup copy.

If you’ve managed to delete files from your Mac that you need, or found that your hard drive is damaged beyond retrieval, contact data recovery pros such as Fields Associates to get your files back.