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Don’t Panic! You’ve been busy working on that deadline project for weeks and you suddenly find that you have accidently deleted a major document that is essential and full of days or weeks of research results, what do you do? Some people will try data recovery software to start with but this can harm your data surprisingly enough.

There are some important rules to ensure you follow or are aware of when using data recovery tools for recovering lost files:

When using data recovery software it is important that the software is installed on a different computer to the one that you are trying to recover. Installing further data to the same storage device that you have lost your files on may cause the lost data to be overwritten, making it irretrievable.

Secondly, have you mysteriously lost any file before? If yes your drive may be degraded so a proper data recovery would be a more suitable option.

Thirdly whilst in all probability your prime focus will be to get your data back as soon as possible avoid the temptation to suddenly dive right in and purchase some software straight away. Most file recovery software will offer a free trial so at the very least you can do a scan to see if the document is actually still recognisable on your hard disk or even recoverable for that matter.

When you have found your lost data using software you need to put it somewhere. Now this point is very important: Never recover the file to the media that it was lost from doing so can cause the data to be lost permanently as the software is not intelligent enough to determine whether the area that the file is written back to is the same area that the file was located originally.

Often data recovery software will allocate the space on the hard drive before recovering the file, once the space has been allocated the data may already be partially over-written.

If your data is simply too valuable to trust in the hands of software, particularly if you are not familiar with the data recovery software and the manner in which it works, it is sensible to contact a data recovery professional.

The cost of data recovery is nowhere near (or shouldn’t be ) the cost it used to be due to advances in technology and often you will find that once you deduct the cost of any software purchase and deduct the time to learn what you are trying to do the extra cost of having your data recovered by a professional is not too bad at all.

And lastly, if you choose to use a data recovery company, it is always worth ascertaining what will happen if the drive fails during a recovery process, will they be able to fix it themselves in a proper clean room environment or will they need to send it away to another data recovery company?

If they do not have the facilities for hard drive repair in a clean room environment or there is any sign of mechanical failure then a main data recovery company will be your best option.

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