Human error, fire, flood, hardware failure, these are just a few common causes of data loss on personal or small business computers. When you’ve fallen victim to a data destroying catastrophe, it can seem a bit like the end of the world. Many clients making contact with specialists in Windows, Mac and USB data recovery in New Jersey do so in a state of panic. That’s an indication of just how important computer data has become to us as a society.
For those of us in the data recovery industry, the first thing we often have to do is calm our prospective clients down enough to obtain a comprehensible account of what’s happened to their data. Once we’ve done that, we can get to work and try to perform successful data recovery. But what does that mean exactly? How do professional data recovery services in New Jersey and elsewhere manage to get data back from even badly damaged storage devices?
What Exactly Is Data Recovery?
When you can no longer open or read an electronic file, be it a photograph, Word or Excel document, government form, music or video file, it is deemed to be lost. There are many ways in which you can lose data, hence the industry experts advise you to always backup any data that you consider important. With the best will in the world though, sometimes you may lose anything from a few documents to a full drive or server full of critical data. When you don’t have backup copies of all this lost data, your only hope is if someone can actually retrieve the lost originals. That’s where data recovery can save your business or if you are a home computer owner, your important and sentimentally valuable files.
Data recovery is the process of retrieving lost data in a format that is readable and therefore recovered to its normal state. Professional data recovery services can successfully recover data lost from Hard disk drives, CDs, DVDs, memory cards, tapes, mobile phones and games consoles. Some professionals cover all forms of storage media. Others may specialize in certain areas such as flash drive recovery.
How Does Data Become Lost?
There are many things that can cause data to become inaccessible to a computer user. Here are a few common examples:
- Hard drive failure
- Chewed up tape in a tape backup drive
- Fire damage
- Flood damage
- Disk drive logical failure
- Corruption of device firmware
- Accidental data deletion
- Accidental drive formatting
- Dropped or crushed storage device
While data loss creates a huge impact for businesses, more and more home users, especially freelance and home workers experience critical situations when electronic documents cannot be accessed. Consequently the demand for professional data recovery services in NJ is growing exponentially. Only professional data recovery, performed in “clean room” environments can safely recover data lost as a result of the examples above. Unfortunately DIY attempts by users to recover lost data often worsen the problem, making subsequent recovery by professionals being more difficult and therefore costly.
How Do Professionals Recover Lost or Corrupt Data?
In most cases, data recovery engineers first try to make one or more “images” of the storage device holding the unreadable data. This gives the engineers a safe way of working on the problem without risk of completely losing the original data. They will then run various professional software applications to try and recover the lost or damaged data and make it readable again. There is a very good reason why images are made. When running the recovery software, there is always a risk that the problem data will get overwritten, in which case even professional recovery will not get it back. By working on an image, the engineers aren’t directly putting your original data at further risk.
If your data problem is the result of a failed or badly damaged drive, the engineers will have to break the device open and access the internal parts to perform invasive data recovery. This activity is performed in a professional clean room. A clean room is a specially controlled environment, designed and operated to Federal standards. The clean room is a dust and particulate-free working space in which engineers can safely open and work on disk drives. Even the smallest amount of dust can quickly contaminate the platters on a hard drive, rendering it useless and eliminating any chance of data recovery.
In the clean room, data recovery engineers do all they can to get a malfunctioning drive working for just long enough to make a drive image, from which they can then recover your data onto a working storage device. To do this they may have to source spare parts just to get the broken drive working.
When all possible data has been retrieved, the data recovery service will provide you with a list of all the files that have been successfully retrieved. This will not necessarily include every file that you lost. Sometimes it’s simply impossible to recover every last piece of lost data. After you approve the list of files, you will be given your recovered data on an appropriate storage medium. This might be a CD, DVD or even on a new hard drive.
Is Professional Data Recovery Always Successful?
Unfortunately a New Jersey data recovery service can never guarantee to successfully recover all your data, especially from a badly damaged hard drive. In some cases the engineers may not be able to recover any of your data. For this reason many service providers operate on a “no recovery. No fee” basis. They will always recover any data they can and for many clients, especially businesses, the recovery of even some lost data is worth the expense.
To give the experts the best chance of recovering lost data, it’s highly recommended that you stop using your computer or storage device the moment you realize you have a problem. This minimizes the risk of your lost data being overwritten and therefore irretrievable. If you are in this predicament and seeking professional Mac, PC or flash drive recovery in New Jersey, Dave’s Computers can help. Bring your device along to our store or give the team a call on 908-428-9558.
by David Molnar
