Basic Hard Drive Data Recovery

A Backup Article Contributed by Melissa Larose

Basic Hard Drive Data Recovery

If you are not prepared, hard drive data recovery can make you crazy. Poor planning and inadequate information can cause a business to go belly up quickly. If you do not know the importance of your data within your business, then you cannot possibly understand the need for disaster planning, the possibility of hard drive failure and the need for data recovery.

Hard Drive Data Recovery Includes Planning

So it is midnight on a Thursday morning. During a batch process one of your servers suffers begins the process of failure. Your IT staff arrives at 7:00 am that morning to discover that the hard drive has completely failed and only part of your backup has completed. The staff freezes the system and asks everyone not to log on. They examine the situation and realize they do not have the proper tools to deal with the situation. They call the hard drive data recovery service that the company has on retainer.

An engineer from the hard drive data recovery service arrives by 8:00 am recovers the data, and even brings you a new hard drive. The existing hard drive has completely failed and is not useable. The new drive is attached and loaded from a previous backup and your system is backup and running. In the mean time, the engineer is able to locate the missing data on the hard drive and the new drive is updated. By 9:00 am your business is rolling for the day.

Hard Drive Data Recovery What If's

What if, in the previous scenario, there had been no planning? What if the hard drive data recovery service had never been interviewed, selected, and retained? What would your company have done in a disaster situation as described?

Do not respond with, "Well, it can't happen to us", because it can. Hard drive failure is expected at some time in a hard drive's use. Hard drive's are mechanical devices and are subject to mechanical failure. Data recovery from these failed hard drives can be difficult depending on how the failure happened and what the user or IT team has done in response. Many people respond by attempting to log off and on to the system or trying to create and save more files.

This response can further complicate the data recovery attempt because continuing to work with the system causes the system to continue to attempt to write to the hard drive. Sometimes this is still possible or partially possible and the risk of overwriting the critical data existing on the hard drive prevents data recovery altogether.

Hard Drive Data Recovery Tips

So, here is the first tip. Stop everything when a hard drive fails and the need for data recovery appears eminent. It can save you time and heartache. And there is nothing worse than missing data in a work environment.

The second tip is, retain a hard drive data recovery service before a disaster strikes your business network. The cost far outweighs the grief you encounter if you don't.