Why does my hard drive appear smaller? Have I lost data?

May 13, 2019

Picture the scene, you have just bought a new 1TB hard drive, installed it into your computer, fired it up, formatted it and see that it’s only 0.9TB in size. What happened to the rest? Have you lost data or is the hard drive broken? This is a common question we hear at Dave’s Computers […]

Read more →

How to prolong your hard drive and reduce the chances of data loss

Apr 29, 2019

While Dave’s Computers will always be around to recover your data, it would be better for everyone if you didn’t lose it in the first place. One easy way to do that is to treat your hard drives the right way. While designed to be reliable and robust, there are some practical things you can […]

Read more →

How to clone a Mac hard drive

Feb 25, 2019

We talk a lot about backing up your Windows hard drive to prevent data loss and to speed up recovery but we rarely mention Mac. While Apple computers are more stable than Windows can be, it isn’t immune to failure or to faults. Today I’m going to show you how to create a bootable clone […]

Read more →

Maximize the life of your hard drive

Jan 16, 2019

After putting together ‘Can you repair a broken hard drive?’ last week, I began wondering if there are some practical things you can do to maximize the life of a working drive. Data recovery is a big part of what we do here at Dave’s Computers in New Jersey but we really wish it wasn’t. […]

Read more →

Can you repair a broken hard drive?

Jan 9, 2019

You only realize how much you depend on your computer when something goes wrong. Or how much data you store that you never want to lose until your hard drive stops working. The data recovery experts here at Dave’s Computers in New Jersey contend with these issues every day. Perhaps the most common question we […]

Read more →

How to prepare your old laptop or computer for sale

Nov 30, 2018

With Black Friday behind us and Christmas not far away it is a popular time for selling old tech to make room for the new. If you’re buying a new laptop, desktop or even hard drive and plan to sell your old one, you need to learn how to prepare your old laptop or computer […]

Read more →

How to prevent data loss due to ransomware

Feb 20, 2017

One of the most ‘popular’ causes of data loss is ransomware. Here at Dave’s Computers, many of the data recovery requests we see are from virus or malware infections, especially ransomware. It is one of the worst types of attacks on the internet and a cause of a lot of angst for computer users. They […]

Read more →

Data recovery myths that really need to be busted

Feb 7, 2017

Data recovery has been an industry since shortly after IBM computers became widespread in the 1980s. As soon as people began storing data on hard drives, hard drives began failing and data began to be lost. Thereafter, an industry was born. As someone who has been a part of that industry for many years, I […]

Read more →

How to quieten a noisy hard drive

Oct 17, 2016

If you work in a quiet room, hearing the rattle and whirr of a hard drive (HDD) can quickly become an annoyance. As the inside of a PC case can act as an echo chamber, the smallest noise can be amplified exponentially until all you can hear is that mechanical noise as your computer […]

Read more →