Surf Wonders

  Backup protection not just give protection against data loss caused by hardware breakdown, lost power, extreme weather, or some other disaster. No, the backups also give protections against small mishaps. Companies make to portable external hard drives and to tape backup devices among other backup methods in order to secure the organization from accidental data loss that could cause problems for the business. But sometimes, the protections of backups are not for organizations but for home users. These are private computer users who have not done regular backups and collected tons of family photos the loss of which makes great personal distress.

Suppose you work as a PC support technician and you get contacted by a desperate home user who say that the PC won’t work and the computer won’t start up again. Most likely the hard disk had a breakdown. And you know by what you have learned that there would probably not exist any backup. Suppose for a moment! The user, since he was able to display DOS blinking prompt, tried a system utility called FDISK. He figured out that the name meant “Fix disk” and he delete it from one of the disk partitions. This is a situation when a utility to recover data from the hard drives is handy to have.

Disk partitions should be left to those who understand them and how unforgiving it can be if the utilities for them are used wrong. One good option is to have a partition utility such as Norton Ghost. By using such a product you can make a partition backup of computer system files, including configuration files and if you add to that backup software such as Novastor Backup you can make full backups of user files using incremental backup. Sometimes when a simpler partition tool for partition recovery can be used to correct disk partitions back without dangerous loss of data.

Because the hard disk won’t to start up, this does not always mean that the system disk can’t be made to work. It some cases it could be that just a limited area on the hard disk contains bad blocks and that this location is preventing the OS from booting up because several booting errors are reported by the system. If a partition is removed by accident, then the data in that may still be there. Only the partition table has to be modified.

EASEUS Partition Manager is a software product which can restore deleted partitions. File Scavenger is another one. File Scavenger claims that it can recover from formatting of a partition. You can  find other software tools for this, but the goal here is to recreate condition from which you can move the data files onto another partition or backup and then create a newly created boot partition. Now, it can happen that after running the partition recovery tool that Windows starting up but in case that it won’t, you want to at least be able to get to a DOS prompt and be able to see the files that need to be moved off.

If you have the fortune to be able to see the DOS prompt command and see the lost data files that is located in the user’s “My Documents” folder, then it should be possible to connect to an external backup drive (the simplest solution is to use a USB external hard drive) and to start moving the files off to this drive. From here, the disk drive should be reformatted, Windows reloaded, and the moved files can be recovered. This of course is a complicated and time consuming process but your client should be happy to get the family photo album restored back.

You have probably had to endure at some stage of your life the subtle foreign babble that many people tend to speak that are involved in technical employment and the data recovery services industry is no different

Most of the time that you are exposed to what appears to be plain gibberish is when you actually need help and the last thing you want to do is to suddenly have a huge learning curve to simply understand what is being said to you.

Not picking on any camp in particular as most technical sectors have there own techno babble, but lets look at terms often used by data recovery services companies.

When you have a data recovery problem the chances are that your problem will be described as one of two different types and these are logical problems and physical and physical problems, although to add to the confusion there are some grey areas where the two overlap.

Physical categories just as the name implies are problems that can affect storage media due to some form of mechanical failure. Often mechanical failures will require a hard drive repair of some description but if the problem is caught early enough and for some types of physical failure a hard disk repair may not be necessary.

Just as with any mechanical device if you keep on using it further damage can occur for example inside a hard drive is a reading/ writing arm (called read/write heads). If this comes into contact with the internal spinning drive (head crash) it creates debris which then causes further crashes and in extreme cases this cycle continues until the platter is destroyed beyond repair.

Logical problems tend to revolve around file loss or damage of some description and generally this is not as serious (or as costly) to recover although this may not be the case if somebody has made a bodged data recovery attempt. Generally the files and folders are still on the drive (even if they have been deleted or the drive has been formatted) somewhere but they can’t be seen or perhaps simply can’t be read as they may have become corrupted (file corruption) in some way.

One common problem that can manifest itself and is often a source of data loss is hard drive degradation, in simplistic terms this is where parts of the drive have simply lost the ability to be either written to or read from. The data on the drive may still be recoverable but it is just difficult to “see” so needs to be read using specialist tools.

Other physical failures if you want to know more may include head crashes, drive degradation causing bad sectors, actuator failure, power surges that damage the main PCB, hard drive motor damage, firmware corruption, seized bearings, media damage, controller errors, platter damage and hard disk over heating issues.

You can find more useful information about these and other data recovery issues at the data recovery companies website.

Have you managed to delete important data from your hard drive?  There should be no reason to worry as there are many data recovery solutions on the market capable of recovering your lost data for you, the key, when using software to recover your files is to follow a process that prevents any further harm coming to your data.

There are some important rules to adhere to when using data recovery software for recovering lost files:

Firstly and a big mistake many people make is not to install the software on the same computer you have been using, why? If you have deleted the file when you install any further software or save anything back to the disk, as the operating system will use what it considers free space to load the program you could end up overwriting the document or part of the document you are trying to recover.

Secondly, have you mysteriously lost any file before? If yes your drive may be degraded so a proper data recovery would be a more suitable option.

Thirdly whilst in all probability your prime focus will be to get your data back as soon as possible avoid the temptation to suddenly dive right in and purchase some software straight away. Most file recovery software will offer a free trial so at the very least you can do a scan to see if the document is actually still recognisable on your hard disk or even recoverable for that matter.

Assuming your drive is exhibiting no signs of failure and having used the software you have managed to find the file (intact) and it is recoverable you’ll now need to save the data somewhere. Under no circumstances save it back to the same drive as you may end up saving the data on back to the same area that the data is being recovered from resulting in a corrupted file.

Often data recovery software will allocate the space on the hard drive before recovering the file, once the space has been allocated the data may already be partially over-written.

Of course before embarking on a DIY data recovery project ascertain the value of your data because if the data loss would be job threatening, costly to your business or simply un-replaceable then don’t take the risk.

The cost for the recovery of files from a hard disk by a professional data recovery organisation is now in most cases comparable to the cost of the full version of the software that you have tried, plus you are normally backed up by a no recovery – no fee guarantee.

And lastly, if you choose to use a data recovery company, it is always worth ascertaining what will happen if the drive fails during a recovery process, will they be able to fix it themselves in a proper clean room environment or will they need to send it away to another data recovery company?

If they do not have the facilities for hard drive recovery and repair and there is any sign of mechanical failure then a main data recovery services company will be your best option.

I guess we have all been there at one stage or another. You have been working on an important project, business proposal or even spent days and sometimes weeks writing an academic paper and all of a sudden the file is no longer there and panic sets in.

You check your deleted files with no luck and do a full search on your computer but the file or folder has simply vanished. In all probability the file is still on your hard disk but for some reason cannot be found which may be the first signs of a degraded drive.

Much as we would like to believe a hard drive will not last forever but has a definitive life expectancy which is often referred to as a mean time between failures (MTB). MTB can often be used as a reference to a drive future reliability and calculations would put expected drive failures at less than 0.1 percent.

But oh if life was so simple!

A question often asked is how long should a hard drive be expected to last before requiring replacement?

This is a very difficult question to answer and also opens up a whole host of other factors that need to be taken into consideration as well.

The first major aspect is of course the use that a computer is put through during its lifespan. Many home users only use their Pc very occasionally and store relatively small numbers of files or photos. In this scenario it would be nice to expect a drive to last over 5 years (don’t assume this though).

The same expectation could be applied to the many mid range computer users which includes office Pc’s laptops and home desktop systems, where users have a small number of programs in use and small amounts of data or if data is stored on a central server.

But for power users it is an entirely different story. Extreme gamers and users of high end commercial applications will be driving their systems very hard indeed and the amount of data that is shifted into swap files or written back to the disk is huge so its only reasonable to expect disk life to be shorter and the chances of drive failure or disk degradation to be far higher.

High end computer users using high end applications will often have a much shorter expected life of their system, and desktop refresh tends to be around 3 years or so to avoid disk failure and to keep them at the cutting edge of computing productivity which is important for a business.

If a hard working drive’s life were to be extended then it would be reasonable to see an increasing ramp up in disk failures over time or drive degradation.

The time between desktop refreshes is often stretched during difficult economic climates but this is not without the greater risk of critical data loss due to failed or degraded drives especially where there is no disaster recovery plan in place.

Computer repair and data recovery companies advising businesses that are intending to stretch there refresh policies would be advised to ensure they have adequate desktop or online data backup protocols in place to be on the safe side.

Another prime factor affecting the longevity of the drive is of course disk maintenance. If your hard drive is allowed to become fragmented then it will have to work an awful lot harder to pick up information and in extreme cases of hard disk fragmentation drives can get very stressed to the point of failure.

Your lost file should be easily recoverable but you do need to bear in mind that any further information written to your hard drive can over write the file you are trying to save. This often happens with data recovery software so if diy recovery is your choice be warned.

Your local data recovery provider will be able to help with all your hard drive recovery and data recovery
needs and will do there utmost to ensure the original data integrity is maintained.