Common Data Recovery Emergencies and What to Do About Them

You’re not the only one who’s ever accidentally emptied the Recycle Bin without checking to make sure that nothing in there was vital to your computer. You’re not the first person to drop your digital camera into the pool. And you’re certainly not the only one spilled a cup of coffee into your laptop. The fact is that no matter how dumb you feel about the way you lost your pictures or files, there are some very common scenarios that data retrieval companies like Fields Data Recovery see nearly every day. In some of these cases, you may be able to get that lost data back yourself.

Ack! Coffee! And Now My Laptop Won’t Boot Up!

Your first reaction when you spill coffee into a laptop can limit or completely prevent problems. Immediately turn your laptop off, remove the battery and turn it upside down to drain as much liquid from it as you can. You can carefully use the corner of a folded paper towel to try to wick out any liquid that hasn’t dripped through the keyboard and into the innards of your machine. Let it dry out completely before attempting to turn it on again.  Sometimes, that’s all it takes, especially if you drink your coffee black with no sugar. If your computer still won’t start up after you’re sure that it’s completely dry, you can still recover the data from the hard drive. Follow the instructions in the computer’s service manual to remove the hard drive from the laptop. Insert it into a USB drive enclosure, which will allow you to access it via another working computer. As long as the hard drive isn’t actually damaged, you should be able to transfer all of your files to the other computer, a flash drive or other removable media. If you can’t access the drive that way, you may need to send the drive off to a professional data retrieval company.

Oh, No! No! I Didn’t Mean To Hit Delete!

Windows throws so many “do you really want to do that?” screens at you that it’s easy to accidentally hit “Yes” when you mean “oops!” This is one of the easiest data mishaps to fix. Stop using your computer immediately. When you first delete a file, your computer doesn’t actually destroy the data. It just marks the sector so that you can’t access the data and the computer knows that it can overwrite it. The longer you continue to use your computer, the greater the risk that you’ll overwrite the data and make it unrecoverable. Use another computer to download a freeware undelete program. Install it on a USB drive and run it from that drive to find your deleted files and restore them using the program’s undelete option.

My Camera’s Memory Card Is Corrupt!

First, do not format your card. While it may be possible to recover images from a formatted card, it’s much harder and you’ll have some data loss. Try to recover the lost data using a freeware program called Smart Recovery, which is designed to recover data from memory cards.

If all of your attempts fail, all is not lost. In nearly all cases, a professional data recovery company can access and retrieve nearly all of your lost data files.