Losing all the pictures you have of you and your family on your hard drive can be devastating. Losing all of your business’ data, however, can leave you in financial ruin. These two examples, although extreme, are just a few of the things that make data backup and recovery important. But the truth is, people barely ever have backup files, which I find weird because cloud backup has become so widely accessible. However, even if you don’t have data backup and your hard drive decides to die one day, not all hope is lost. There’s still a decent possibility that you’ll be able to retrieve data from your hard drive, even though it’s seemingly dead.
Your best bet is to seek professional help. There are many companies that specialise in data recovery from all types of hard drives suffering from a wide range of problems. Find a reliable company that does retrieve data from hard drive and ask them about their services. A good company will use the latest and most popular recovery software that may not be available to the general public, or it may be quite expensive to purchase a license for. If you’re a business that handles sensitive data, these IT companies will work at your discretion and handle your data professionally and securely.
But how do you know whether you need a professional service to retrieve data from hard drive? Well, some of the symptoms include the hard drive producing clunking, whistling, knocking or grinding sounds, smoke, physical burns, your OS may be freezing, not booting or hanging, accidental drive imaging, formatting or file deletion. These are just some of the hundreds of symptoms, meaning that you can’t always be sure what’s wrong, which is another reason to put your hard drive into the hands of an experienced professional who can make a proper diagnosis.
However, if you feel like you have the knowledge and skills to perform a recovery yourself, but you don’t know what tool to use, the two most popular, which I’ve had personal success with are Recuva and OnTrack EasyRecovery.
Recuva might seem like an unfamiliar name, but it’s the same company that made CCleaner, a popular program that helps clean up, optimize and speed up devices. Recuva offers multi-platform support, it is incredibly easy to use and works well with a wide range of media. This software will allow you to recover files stored on external hard drives, system drives, memory sticks, CDs and DVDs. It does all of this through a user-friendly interface. It utilizes military-standard techniques to process files, so you don’t have to worry about sensitive data ending up in the wrong hands.
OnTrack EasyRecovery, on the other hand, offers a comprehensive data recovery platform that’s free and gives you the ability to pause the process. It works both on Mac and Windows computers, and it’s popular because it’s described as a DIY data recovery software, allowing you to swiftly retrieve data from virtually any device, ranging from hard drives to USB sticks, RAID volumes, optical media, and local or external SSDs. You can rescue corrupt files from malicious attacks, and you can recover accidentally, or intentionally deleted files.