Avoiding Hard Drive Recovery

A Backup Article Contributed by Ashley Lister

Avoiding Hard Drive Recovery

Rather than go through the painstaking and expensive process of hard drive recovery, it is more sensible to try to avoid the need. By taking the time and trouble to lay a few preventive measures in place you can drastically reduce the chances of your needing to recover "lost" information.

Hard Drive Recovery Becomes a Necessity When a Hard Drive is Physically Damaged.

Regularly defragment your hard drive. When clusters and sectors are no longer contiguous on a hard drive, recovery can become a major issue. Regular defragmentation keeps clusters and sectors contiguous and means, should the need for recovery or any type of file undelete every arise, you will be better placed to deal with the eventuality.

For the same reason you should regularly use scandisk or some other utility that checks the integrity of your hard drive. If a sector or cluster did develop a fault, a utility like scandisk could detect the problem before it effected data and make the act of recovery unnecessary.

Make sure power leads are protected by surge protection units - spikes of electricity can corrupt hard drives leading to irreparable damage. Similarly keep your machine running at the temperatures and conditions specified within the instruction manual. Should you need to upgrade any internal component ensure it is installed by a competent and certified professional.

It Can Be Necessary to Employ a Specialist in Hard Drive Recovery after a Malicious User (or Even a Careless One) Has Accidentally Deleted or Altered an Important File.

Do not become complacent when deleting files. Each time a warning message appears, reminding you that you are about to delete a file, read the warning and make sure the file you are deleting is the one that you really wanted to delete. The recycle bin does offer a second chance but it doesn't hold information forever and some files are too large for the recycle bin.

Regular backups, password protection and a sensible use policy should all be employed to guard against the threat of malicious users. Firewall protection can also prevent malicious users from deleting files through remote connections or over a Wide Area Network (WAN).

Some Virus Attacks Can Be So Pernicious They Make Hard Drive Recovery Necessary.

It would be impossible to list all the viruses that could possibly cause damage to a hard drive and new and more virulent variations are being written every day. Antivirus software, regular antivirus scans, and frequent updating of the antivirus database, are all exemplary ways of ensuring against the threat of virus attack.

Again, the installation of a resilient firewall is good practice to limit access to those might potentially cause damage.

Hard drive recovery is a costly and time consuming process.

* Always take regular backups.

* Perform regular health checks on your PC.

* Limit the capabilities of those users who might cause damage to files (either accidental or malicious).

* Keep antivirus software up to date.

* Never leave anything to chance.