Data Recovery Myths and Facts

What does data recovery have in common with primitive religions and mythology? If you guessed “voodoo solutions”, you’d be half right. In prehistoric times, man created myths to explain phenomenon he could not understand. The more important something was in his life, the more likely it was that he’d create a myth to explain it – and some voodoo solution to prevent it from happening or recover from it. When you consider the importance of computers and the data that their hard drives and other media hold, it’s no wonder then, that there are so many myths about lost files and data recovery. Here are some of the best known myths about data recovery and the facts about them.

Myth: You can remove the hard drive platters from one drive and put them in another to read them.

It is possible, but not for most users. Hard drive cases should only be opened in a clean room, and only by professional hard drive data recovery professionals. Manufacturers calibrate the alignment of the disk platters and drive heads within thousandths of an inch to maximize performance. If you mess with the inner workings of a drive, you’re seriously compromising the ability of data recovery professionals to recover any of your lost data.

Myth: Lasers can read hard drive disks without opening the case.

Chalk this myth up under the “not yet” heading. There’s promising research using lasers and other external means to scan hard drives, but so far there’s nothing that’s practical for use even by commercial data recovery firms. It may happen someday, though, and it will eliminate the risks of opening a hard drive case.

Myth: Hard drive manufacturers guarantee recovery of data from a failed hard drive.

Unless there is a special arrangement for a particular company, manufacturers of hardware don’t cover the cost of data recovery under warranty agreements. In fact, most manufacturers explicitly exclude data from coverage under their warranties, and state that they are not responsible for data that’s lost or damaged during transit, repair or replacement of your hard drive. Back up your data regularly so that you can restore it to a new hard drive or to a hard drive after repair if necessary.

Myth: You can use data recovery software to recover data from a drive that has failed mechanically.

If a hard drive has failed or is failing mechanically, any attempts to access or recover data from that drive can further damage the data on the drive and make it more difficult to recover.

If your hard drive has failed or if you can’t access a hard drive for any reason, the best course of action is to call in a data recovery professional like Fields Data Recovery. Don’t try to go it alone or you risk making it impossible to recover data that you might otherwise have been able to save.

Data Recovery Tips for Small BusinessBusiness

If you run a small business, you’re more likely to need data recovery services than your bigger corporate brothers. Today, more and more small businesses rely on their computers and computer files to help them get information out to customers, keep track of accounts and cut their expenses. Computerization has made many of the parts of doing business easier. From accounting to publishing, the computer makes it easier for one person to handle most, if not all, of the tasks that used to require a full office staff. With one computer, you can handle the books and accounting, sales, communications and other parts of your business. However, this also makes your business more vulnerable to data loss and increases the likelihood that you’ll need data recovery services in the future.

Unlike larger businesses, these small business operations usually can’t afford such luxuries as fully redundant RAID drives and expensive data backup systems. When something goes wrong with their hard drives or other data storage devices, they often have no choice other than to turn to a professional data recovery service like Fields Data Recovery. In many cases, that’s an expensive option – and it’s made more expensive and difficult if the small business owner takes the wrong steps in trying to recover his lost files himself. In fact, in many cases, the business can avoid the need for data recovery services by taking a few important steps.

Backup, Backup and Backup Your Data

The biggest risk you can take with your business is to have only one set of up to date records. That’s why backing up your data regularly should be a vital part of your business routine. These days, it’s easier and less expensive to do than ever. In fact, it’s fairly easy to do a three-layer backup yourself, without taking a lot of your time.

Subscribe to an automatic backup service that backs up your files to an off-site computer every night. Most only cost a few dollars a month, and there are even free services you can use. If you’re willing to do a little bit of work yourself, you can even do nightly backups and transfer the backup to an online, off site server yourself.

Back up important files after any major changes to an external data storage device, such as an exterior hard drive or tape drive. You can set your computer to do this automatically, but be sure to check the backups regularly to ensure that they’re error-free and restorable.

Keep a second copy of your most important files on your computer, and use Save As to update the second copy whenever you make a significant change. That gives you immediate access to a backed up copy in the event you accidentally delete the file or can’t access it.

Practice Safe Data Recovery

You should also be aware that nearly anything you do with your hard drive after it starts to fail may make it more difficult for data recovery experts to retrieve any data from it in the event you are unsuccessful. If you can’t access the disk at all, your best option is to contact a reputable data recovery firm, such as Fields Data Recovery, and follow their instructions to the letter.

Data Recovery from Solid State Drives

Solid state drive technology is moving into more and more arenas, and with good reason. SSD is increasingly used in mobile devices and often replaces traditional hard disk drives in high-quality laptops, netbooks and desktop computers. While SSDs offer many advantages for data storage, they also offer exceptional challenges for data recovery, according to data recovery professionals. The traditional methods of data recovery don’t work with solid state drives, which rely on a completely different method of storing data than do hard disk drives.

Solid State Drives vs. Hard Disk Drives

SSDs were originally developed for military use, and later adapted for use in MP3 players, USB drives and memory cards, including those commonly used in camcorders, digital cameras and phones. They differ drastically from hard drive disks, which store data on magnetically charged disks. SSDs instead use a solid-state semiconductor, such as a memory chip or other electrically erasable RAM devices. Because they don’t use moving parts nor require synchronization among moving parts, SSDs boot up more quickly, access files more quickly, launch applications more quickly and move data more quickly, and do so while using less energy. This means faster operation and longer battery life.

Data Loss and Data Recovery on Hard Drives

Hard drives are more susceptible to data loss as a natural consequence of mechanical wear, among other things. There are two types of hard drive failures that lead to a need for data recovery – logical failures, such as accidentally deleted files, corrupted data, software errors and corrupted data; and mechanical failures that happen because of physical damage to the drive – scratched disks, for example. While it’s easier to lose data from a hard drive, data recovery is also generally relatively easy. Even in cases of actual physical failure, which requires the work of a data recovery professional, most of the data can often be recovered.

SSD Data Recovery – Less Often Necessary but Harder to Do

Since SSDs don’t have any moving parts, they’re far less likely to suffer from mechanical failure than hard drives, and thus far less likely to suffer data loss. When it does happen, however, it’s usually because of electrical damage, firmware corruption or controller failure. Of course, you can still accidentally delete files or get a virus that corrupts your files. Unfortunately, the very things that make SSDs more efficient and faster also make data recovery harder. Unlike hard drives, which can overwrite data, SSDs must erase data before writing new data to a section on the drive. In order to maximize performance, many SSDs periodically “clean up” the drive by erasing orphaned blocks of data, making it far less likely that data recovery professionals can find and recover the data that was originally written to them.

Data recovery experts use proprietary methods to recover as much data as possible even from solid state drives, and many have remarkable success at doing so. If you’ve lost data from a device that stores it on an SSD and think it’s irretrievably gone, check with a data recovery expert such as Fields Data Recovery, before giving up on it. There have been surprising strides in data recovery technology that allow professionals to retrieve data from many SSDs.

Data Recovery in the Era of Cloud Computingthe

Cloud computing is the wave of the future, or at least it appears to be. It offers many advantages over traditional methods of networking and application use, and it can be more secure, suggests a former information security officer for the Justice Department, but you shouldn’t rely on cloud computing for disaster recovery. You can make automated data storage a part of your disaster recovery plans and business continuity planning, but be sure to also make a plan for traditional data recovery services.

Cloud computing can make post-disaster data recovery easier in some cases, but it’s best not to count on it exclusively. If you haven’t already developed a disaster recovery plan that includes data retrieval, there’s not time better than before disaster strikes.

First Steps in a Post-Disaster Data Recovery Plan

All data is not created equal. Your company won’t suffer much if you lose the file of job descriptions, most of which exist in hard copy. The loss of the customer order files, on the other hand, could put a significant crimp in your business.

The first step in creating a post-disaster data recovery plan is to classify your data by its importance to your company so that you can assign it a level of priority for backup and recovery.

Create a backup plan and institute backup procedures and policies based on the priorities you identified. As part of that plan, identify the roles that each person on your data recovery team will fill. Make sure that each person understands the importance of carrying out his or her assigned role and give them ownership of it. The biggest pitfall in designing backup plans is employees who are not fully on board with or accountable for the data recovery plan you’ve come up with.

Always, always, always check your backups periodically to be sure that they’re running right if they’re automated, and that they can actually be restored. An IT chief’s worst nightmare is popping in the backup tape to restore lost data only to find that the file is corrupt or an error prevents your system from doing a full restore.

Identify a data recovery firm, such as Fields Associates, to handle data recovery chores that can’t be handled onsite. Don’t wait till it’s too late to identify the right company to handle your data recovery problems. You’ll have more perspective and time to make the right choice when you’re not panicked by an emergency.