Have you ever tried to back up a hard drive? It is hard enough trying to back up Windows. Backing up a hard drive doesn’t necessarily need to be that hard, but if you want to be able to recover your data in the event of a disaster, you will need to have it backed up.
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Basic Guide to Hard Drive Recovery
That is pretty easy in the Toronto area, but if you aren’t in Toronto hard drive recovery is definitely something that you want to think about and have a plan for. You need to have a go-to resource for things like RAID repair, data tape recovery, hard drive data recovery and various other types of solutions for media recovery.
What It Is
When your hard drive crashes, or fails, you might think it is an operating system failure at first if you are not a computer expert. The difference is that when your OS fails – be it Mac, Linux, or Windows – that is called a logical failure. When the hard drive crashes, it is known as a physical failure. Either one of these things will make your data inaccessible, even though it is still there.
For this reason, you need to have a backup plan as well as an image of your hard drive – just in case. If you don’t, there might still be hope for your data if you have a data recovery solution.
The best thing you can do is to be proactive and make sure that all of the data on the drive is backed up.
Physical Failure
When a hard drive failure is caused by the hard drive itself malfunctioning, this is known as a physical failure. There is still a good chance that most of your data will still be intact and recoverable. You will know whether or not the failure is a physical one by the noise coming from the drive.
Don’t mistake these sounds for the one that a malfunctioning cooling fan will make. Open the case carefully and take a good listen to the drive. The drive might still be functioning but on its last legs. If it is whirring, clicking, pinging, and grinding, you have a problem.
When It Fails
It finally happened and you weren’t prepared. Your hard drive has failed. What do you do? Is your data still there and safe? Do you need to replace your entire computer? Is your personal information safe?
Let’s take a minute and recap what you need to do really quickly.
• Is it really the hard drive? Are you able to start your computer in safe mode? If so, you might want to try using a bit of software to test the drive.
• Is it connected? If you know what the inside of a computer should look like, you can check to see if the hard drive has somehow gotten disconnected from the motherboard, or even if the connections are a little loose.
• Listen to it. Is your hard drive making any sort of odd sounds while it is running? Do you hear it cracking and/or skipping, or making any other odd sort of noises that it doesn’t normally make? If so, that is a good sign that something inside is messed up.
• Take it in. If you aren’t equipped to do repair to your hard drive and data recovery from your own home or office, you would be better off calling in a professional or taking it to their place of business. You don’t want to continue messing with it and make the situation any worse.
• Get the data recovered. You might have data on the drive that is vital and you can’t bear to part with it. A professional hard drive data recovery service might be able to recover that data for you, depending on how bad the hard drive was damaged and whether the data is on a sector that has been damaged. 🙂
