Steps to Prevent Data Recovery Problems

The best way to avoid the cost of shipping your hard drives out to a data recovery company is to be proactive in making sure that you’ll never need data retrieval services. You can greatly reduce the chances that you’ll have to lay out the bucks to recover your lost database or your company’s customer records by following some best data security practices. If the worst happens, though, and you need to restore data to your hard drives and other data devices, knowing what to do will ensure that you don’t accidentally make it impossible for your chosen data recovery company to retrieve any data at all. These tips will help you preserve the data that’s vital to you, even if you do need data recovery services.

Make an operating system recovery disk. Windows gives you the option to create a recovery disk that you can use to restore the drivers and restart your computer if it fails to start. Do it. One of the most common reasons for data loss is an operating system failure and subsequent formatting of the hard drive.

Use Restore Points liberally. Your Windows PC creates automatic restore points to make it easy for you to back your computer up to an earlier date. You can also create your own. Make it a practice to create a restore point before you install any new program or hardware on your computer.

Set up regular backups. Use built-in utilities to backup your computer frequently, but remember the limitations of backups kept on your hard drive. At least once a week, back up your entire hard drive to a secondary drive or an online backup vault. In between, backup copies of important files, such as customer databases and records, that change frequently.

Protect your computer from physical damage. In most cases, if your data loss occurs because of a software error, you can probably do the data recovery job yourself. If it’s the result of physical damage to the drive, however, it’s a job for data recovery pros.

If you can’t access your hard drive at all, don’t try to recover the data on it yourself. Every attempt you make to retrieve data from a non-functioning hard drive carries the risk of destroying the data completely.

If you don’t have backups and can’t access your hard drive, contact a data recovery company such as Fields Data Recovery and follow their recommendations for shipping your hard drive to them for a full data recovery operation.