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.