Data Recovery

It happens to everyone eventually. Either by an accidental drop, a rename of a folder, or just cleaning out files too quickly, data is lost. Sometimes it isn’t a big deal. Sometimes it feels like someone just punched you in the gut. What are your options?

Well there are a bunch of options out there for both PC and Mac users to recover lost or deleted files. But the process depends on what happened to lose access to the files. If you dropped your laptop or external drive and now it’s making clicking noises when you try to use it, sorry, there isn’t much that can be done that is cheap or free. In cases like these, your only option may be to send the drive away to a data recovery company that will disassemble the drive and see what data can be recovered. The bad thing about these companies is they usually charge anywhere from $250 - 500 just to look at the drive, and then the price goes up if they find files they can recover.

But, what if you’ve just accidentally deleted some files? Or maybe you mistakenly formatted a drive or tried to install a new version of an operating system on it and that created new partitions on the drive? In these cases, you might actually be able to get your data back with a little time and some free software.

One invaluable tool I’ve used a lot in all computer work is a utility CD called Hiren’s Boot CD. On this CD are a bunch of programs for backing up, restoring, resetting forgotten passwords, and more on a Windows or Linux PC. Hiren’s CD has a handful of recovery utilities that can do a deep scan of your hard drive to find lost files. On the Mac side, I’ve bought a utility called Data Rescue that works pretty intuitively. While these utilities work, sometimes they won’t recover the names of the files - and you’ll be left to sort through a number of randomly named files to find what you’re looking for, and then rename them to what they were before. A little hassle, but at least the file is restored.

The important thing to note is that if you have deleted a file, it’s best to not save anything further to the drive until you’ve recovered what you’re looking for. If the computer writes over the location on the drive where your deleted files were stored, the chance of ever getting them back basically disappears. So when it happens, grab the recovery CD of your choice and shut down your computer and boot off to start the recovery as soon as possible. This will minimize the risk.