Monday, November 14, 2011

Tips for Successful Data Recovery

If your company depends on computer data for any part of your everyday operations, having a data recovery and backup plan is vital to managing your risk. While the best way to avoid losing your important data is to have an established backup routine, nothing is foolproof. Data recovery should be a part of your overall backup planning, and you should have a relationship with a data recovery company like Fields Data Recovery before you need them. In addition, there are a few things you can do to make it easier for a data recovery company to recover any lost files or data on your hard drives or servers.

Defragment Regularly

Running a defrag program on your computer regularly increases the chances for a data recovery to bring your files back from the dead. A defrag program goes through your hard drive and moves all the pieces of your files and folders to one location on your hard drive. That makes it easier for a data recovery tech to find all the pieces of each file and pull the data off. One caveat – do not run a defrag program if you suspect your hard drive is failing or if it has failed. If the drive is bad, you could end up wiping out the data you want to save and make it impossible for a tech to perform data restoration.

Backup Before Changing Anything

Before you make any hardware or software changes, do a full backup and validate it. If your computer is inaccessible after the change, you’ll have a valid backup to restore.

If your hard drive is making funny noises, turn your computer off immediately and call your data recovery company. Unusual noises signal a mechanical problem with your hard drive. Continuing to run the drive after it starts making noises can cause permanent damage and data loss.

Always restore any data to a different hard drive or location, not onto the hard drive that lost data.

If you are removing hard drives from a RAID array to ship them to a data recovery company or for any other reason, label the drive with its original position in the array.

If you suspect that a hard drive has gone bad, do not run a volume repair utility on it. You’ll risk wiping out any information that a data recovery company could retrieve.

What you do before and immediately following a data loss directly affects how successful any data recovery attempts may be. Make sure that anyone in your company who works with the computers and servers understands the procedure they should follow in case of data loss to increase the chances of a successful data recovery.


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