Archive for June, 2010

What to do in case of a drive emergency

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

In the event of problems with a hard drive, you are always flirting with data loss. Here are a few simple rules to determine what your next step should be:

Scenario 1: You hear a drive making unusual clicking and/or grinding noises.
Steps to take: Stop using the drive immediately. Whenever a drive produces these kinds of sounds, you’re risking that the heads are scraping over the platters (called “scoring”) which will make it impossible to read any data off the drive. Call the Data Rescue Center immediately!

Scenario 2: A drive is no longer recognized by the computer and doesn’t show up on the computer at all or only very intermittently. The motor inside the drive is spinning, however, and does not produce and unusual sounds.
Steps to take: Very likely a failure of the drive’s electronics, however the data can usually be fully recovered. Any drive that does not show up at all on a computer despite seemingly working fine can typically not be recovered by the user. Please call the Data Rescue Center for a free evaluation of the drive.

Scenario 3: A drive is showing unreliable behavior. It occasionally seems to freeze when accessing data, but does get recognized properly by the computer.
Steps to take: In a situation where a drive shows some inexplicable, seemingly random behavior, this points to the drive having many bad blocks or a weakness of one or more of the read/write heads. You should copy important data off this drive ASAP and replace the drive.

Scenario 4: Data has been accidentally deleted from the drive, or the drive has been formatted or partitioned by mistake, causing data stored previously on this drive to be gone.
Steps to take: Do not write any new data to this drive, as this will make a full recovery impossible. All these actions mentioned have so far only affected the Table Of Contents on the drive, the actual data is still there and can be recovered with a software package like Data Rescue. By not allowing any new data being written to the drive you prevent that your old data is being overwritten and gone for good, because once new data is written over your data, it can never be brought back.

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How to avoid the need for data recovery

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Talking about how to avoid the need for data recovery seems contradictory to the mission of a data recovery company like the Data Rescue Center. However, we’re not really giving away any trade secrets, just disseminating a little bit of common sense.

There are two main factors that drive the need for data recovery services: data loss through either accidental actions like deleting files or formatting/partitioning drives, or failed hardware, i.e. failure of the drive itself. And the second factor is the lack of backups.

We don’t expect the first factor to change anytime soon. Let’s face it, we all make mistakes, and emptying the trash can that contained important files is easily done. Also, any hard disk will ultimately die, some sooner, some later, but drive failure is inevitable.

This leaves us with the second major factor: backups. If you have working backups, whatever the reason for your data loss, you can go to your backups and just restore those files you mistakenly deleted, or if the whole drive failed you just get a new one (which will probably cost you less and provide you with a lot more storage space) and write the backup onto said new drive.

Sure, it will cost you some time and effort, as well as potentially the price for a new drive, but nothing that compares to the peace of mind of having working backups and being able to access them when necessary.

Sadly, most people still don’t have a backup solution in place, despite the fact that with today’s choices and prices for storage, it really is a no-brainer. Remember, you don’t really care about the drive itself, only about the data on it. That’s why a failed drive that is still under warranty will be replaced by the manufacturer; the data on it, however, is not. The only way to get your data back at that point is data recovery, and it typically costs more than it would have cost to just get that external hard drive you always intended to get to begin with.

So if you haven’t yet set up backups of your irreplaceable photos, movies, music, and work documents, do it ASAP! One day you’ll be glad you did.

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