Helpful Hints: Data Recovery

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Losing your data can be a nightmare. Follow these steps to minimise your loss.

If you accidentally delete a file, it can be annoying, stressful, and a real pain to rectify. Go one step further, and lose your hard drive, and you may feel inclined to get in contact with an expensive Data Recovery Service.

Before you get too stressed out, you should read this. You may want to print this and file it for future reference.

You may also want to avail yourself of the following:

Steps to Recovery

The number one rule to follow when you have lost data is to not write anything more to the affected hard drive! That means that if you have deleted a partition by accident, do not create another partition. If you have deleted files from the recycle bin that you shouldn’t have, do not save anything to the drive. Why? Because hard drives do not actually erase anything, neither data nor partitions. When you delete a file from the operating system, it is just marked on the drive as having been deleted. When the system needs to store more data on the drive, it will consider files on the drive marked 'deleted' as being empty space, and dutifully copy over them. That is not good.

The same rule applies twice over for partitions; since partition information just presents the operating system with a way of addressing the space available on the drive. If you wipe out a partition everything from it will seem to be gone.

So if there is no partition information, no data can be read by the operating system. This does not mean that your data is not there - you can't see it.

Hard Drive Data Recovery:

The first and best thing to do in a data-loss situation is to make sure no more data is written to the drive. Obviously, if you have just the one partition and it's corrupt, you can't boot normally to the operating system. The best option in this situation is to transfer the drive to another computer, preferably one using the same file-system as your damaged partition (i.e. the same operating system, or a newer version).

Transferring the HDD to another computer has the dual benefit of preventing the drive from being written to accidentally, and potentially allowing you to retrieve information from the disk just by using Windows Explorer to look through file structures.

If you have damaged or erased essential operating system files, but the partition information is still intact Windows will not boot. The HDD can still be read from a different operating system.

File Recovery Programs

If you do not have the means to physically transfer the hard disk, resist the temptation to re-install your OS. There are several software tools available which will enable you to boot your computer with an alternative operating system and then help you try to recover the files.

The simplest way to gain access to the files on your hard drive is boot your computer with a DOS boot disk and then use a DOS compatible file recovery program.

Note that if you have a single hard drive with a single partition that is no longer bootable, file recovery becomes instantly more difficult. Most recovery programs will need a place to copy recovered data, and if you are using the same drive which has the lost data on it you have no guarantee that you will not be destroying more data than you save. It's a far better idea to either install a new hard drive onto the current system and put a new OS on that, or find another computer to transfer the lost hard drive to.

However, there are several programs such as 'Winternals Disk Commander' and 'ERD Commander', that will boot your system straight into DOS or an alternate OS, then perform file recovery.

If you have installed your hard drive into another computer, or if you have put a new drive with a separate OS into your current machine in order to boot, you now have a couple of advantages: Firstly, You can attempt to access your lost data normally through Windows File Explorer. This will not work if the partition information has been changed, since the OS will not 'see' the logical drives.

Secondly, you can safely play with recovering your files, since you now have a completely separate hard drive on which to put recovered data without compromising the source (lost) drive.

Freeware Recovery Programs

If there is one problem with the area of data recovery software, it's that companies know that a functional recovery program is something that people will pay good money for. Hence freeware and non-crippled shareware programs are thin on the ground.

There are a few options available though, so on with the list. Please read these through carefully before deciding the next step you will take.

Commercial Data Recovery Utilities

There are many excellent commercial recovery packages out there. The majority of these are designed to access the disk through an operating system, in which case you will need to have your affected drive transferred to another computer, or at least have a separate drive with a new OS on your original system.

These programs generally use the 'virtual recovery technique, which involves creating an 'image' of the disk to be restored in memory and then transferring files from that image to an alternate hard disk. Two good examples of this type of program are 'Active File Recovery' and R-TT.com's R-Studio.

Following is a partial list of commercially available partition/file recovery and undeletion software that you may use at your own discretion.

R-Studio: http://www.r-tt.com

Disk Commander: http://www.winternals.com/products/repairandrecovery/diskcommander.asp

File Rescue 2.5: http://www.file-rescue.com

GetDataBack for FAT / GetDataBack for NTFS: http://www.runtime.org

Norton Utilities/SystemWorks: http://www.symantic.com

Undelete: http://www.executive.com/consumer/undelete/undelete.asp

Hard Drive Mechanic: http://www.highergroundsoftware.com/6.html

Back2Life: http://www.simtel.net/pub/pd/57588.html

DFSee: http://www.dfsee.com

Fast File Recovery: http://savemyfiles.com/fastfile.htm

Undelete 3.0: http://www.pcconnection.com/scripts/productdetail.asp?product_id=309884