Emergency Data Recovery Strategies

Nobody wants to deal with it, but emergency data recovery is a fact of life if you use a computer with any regularity. Especially if you're not in the habit of getting a new computer every 2-3 years. Data is stored on the hard disk, and that's a physical platform. That means it's susceptible to damage, corruption, and any number of hazards that might obstruct its operation.

The older a hard disk gets, the more likely it is that you'll face the prospect of an emergency requiring the recovery of your precious data. There are four common reasons for lost data: physical damage to the disk, user deletion, user overwriting, and file system corruption.

First Things First

The moment you realize you've got an emergency on your hands, turn off the computer on which the data needs to be recovered. This is critical, because data will continuously be writing to the hard disk as long as the computer is running. If you've got a serious problem, it may be permanently deleting the data you need to recover to make room for the new stuff coming in.

Always remove the disk from your computer and run the data recovery process on it from another machine. Also - and this is vital - run the emergency recovery program from another drive, because it may try to install on the very disk from which you're trying to recover data!

Choosing The Right Tools

Data recovery software for emergencies can be general or highly specific. There are programs, for example, that are designed to look for data in the form of MS Word or Excel files, picking them out where more general programs might miss them and fail to do a proper recovery.



The impulse when you first realize you have a serious data loss problem on your hands is to jump for the quickest solution you can find. Fight that urge! Slow down, think logically, and get some expert advice. If the problem isn't among the worst possibilities, there's every chance you can do the recovery on your own. In other words, the emergency might not be full-blown.

To know this, you need to do a data recovery assessment that is free of all the emotions that probably want to overwhelm you. That's why getting an expert on the phone or in person is advisable. They won't be emotional and they will most likely have dealt with this very problem multiple times with other customers. Either go online and search or call the emergency customer service number for the company from which you purchased your computer.

When In Doubt

If the thought of doing emergency data recovery on your own is just too much, spend the money to get experts to do it. It all depends on how much you need that data. Doing a recovery on your own - if you have no experience and don't know the workings of a computer at least pretty thoroughly - can lead to a bigger disaster. Better to swallow your pride and get data recovery pros to perform 'emergency surgery' on your PC.