How to Recover Documents, Files and Photos

By: James Walsh Posted on: 2007-07-22 ** Print Article ** ** Copy Article ** ** Email Article ** - Category Feed

Article Summary: How to Recover DocuToday, information technology has impacted every area of human endeavour and it has now become impossible to think of a life without digital devices. The latter have replaced traditional devices in every field. Digital cameras have supplanted film cameras. Mobile phones have taken the place of wired phones. ments, Files and Photos

And computers are the favourite equipment of everyone ranging from engineers and scientists to writers and accountants. Truly, information technology devices driven by fast processors and powerful software have enabled us to do tasks faster and with much more convenience than would have been possible otherwise.

Digital devices process and store information in the form of data. This data is stored in a variety of storage devices like hard disks, floppy drives, tape drives, CDs, DVDs, pen drives and flash memory cards. The data residing in these devices is actually in the form of magnetic patterns or electric charge. This is quite volatile and can be easily erased or corrupted. When this happens, the unsuspecting user is left in the lurch.

Data can be lost in a variety of ways. Since data is stored on a hard disk as patterns on a magnetic surface, exposure to a strong magnetic field can realign the polarity of magnetic particles, thus destroying the data pattern. There are other factors too that may make your data inaccessible. The read / write head may crash on the platters, the motor spinning the platters may go dead and the controller card and circuit board may get fried by an electric surge.

Often, users accidentally delete a computer file and empty the recycle bin before realising that it contained important information that is urgently needed. Some even reformat the entire hard disk before remembering that there was a folder residing on it that contained important documents. The user-inflicted data loss is quite common. Often, the system files of a hard drive become corrupted or a virus attack may take a terrible toll and wipe out all the data.

Then, there are accidents and disasters which may cause total data loss. Your notebook may fall over and get run over by a truck on the road! Your digital camera that carries hundreds of pictures may slip out of your hands on a vacation and get submerged in a pool of water. What if a company’s office catches fire, incinerating all computers?

Data loss is a serious affair and can have huge impact on one’s operations. Quite a few companies have been known to go belly up as they couldn’t recover from losing all their data in one fell swoop. Most such data is irreplaceable once lost. Who can replace records of thousands of customers for banks and insurance companies or data acquired over years by R&D companies? That is why there is complete panic when digital data gets lost and there is no backup.

Once you lose data, it is not the end of the world though. A multi-million dollars industry has cropped up in recent years that specialises in recovering lost data from damaged digital products like hard drives, memory cards and optical disks. For minor cases of software failure like accidentally deleted files or a file gone untraceable on a hard disk, one can download off-the-shelf recovery software from various websites. For hardware failures or severe cases of data loss, it is better to approach professional recovery companies.

DIY Software

Many companies have developed Do-It-Yourself data recovery software which can be purchased from their websites. As the name suggests, this software has to be downloaded on to your hard disk. There is an easy-to-use menu that allows you to do a variety of tasks like looking for files that have suddenly gone missing or those that you deleted by mistake. The software scans your hard disk and extracts the data that you want.

The DIY recovery software can handle cases where the file has been deleted and recycle bin emptied of all contents or it has disappeared due to a virus attack or sudden power failure. It is quite effective too when the partition of the file system has been reformatted by the user or where the data cannot be extracted due to bad sectors on the hard disk. Most such recovery software can recover data from floppies, CDs, DVDs and pen drives as well.

Recovery Specialists

If there is a hardware error in the storage device, the DIY software is of little use. The same applies to the cases of data loss due to natural or man-made disasters or where the software errors are complex enough to be beyond the capability of DIY recovery software. This is when you should contact a professional data recovery company. These have the entire infrastructure required to extract your data, like a clean room where the hard disk can be safely opened and exposed for diagnosis.

They have a team of qualified technicians who use specialised software and tools to extract the data from damaged storage media. Some of them like Fields Data Recovery have an impressive data recovery rate of as much as 95 percent. All of them offer a free assessment of your device and tell you in advance how much data can be recovered at what cost and in how much time. There is intense competition in the field of professional data recovery and you should shop around for a good deal.

Article Source: http://www.upublish.info

About the Author:
James Walsh
James Walsh is a freelance writer and copy editor. For more information on computer crime and Computer Forensics see http://www.fieldsassociates.co.uk

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