Browsing the internet will reveal dozens of data recovery hacks that are designed to save you some money getting your data back. But is it wise to attempt DIY data recovery at home?
Due to our ever-increasing reliance on data, it’s inevitable that all of us will experience data loss at some point in our lives. While it might be incredibly tempting to try data recovery at home using DIY techniques gathered from the internet, this can massively backfire. Even if you consider yourself to be tech-savvy, data recovery is a specialist skill that should only be undertaken by the professionals. That said, there are some instances where it may be possible to recover your data at home for free.
Hard drives are not designed to be opened, and are assembled in controlled environments. This is necessary because of the way they work. Data is written to and read from a mechanical hard disk drive by the read/write heads. These delicate heads hover a few nanometres above the hard drive’s magnetic platters, where the data is stored. For physical hard drive faults – like head crashes – you should not attempt data recovery at home. Data recovery specialists will have the correct tools and facilities to ensure the best chance of a successful recovery. All of our data recovery is carried out in our Class 100 clean room, which emulates the conditions in which hard drives are assembled in. The air inside our clean room is constantly filtered, ensuring there is never more than 100 particles of dust per cubic feet, although in reality there are far fewer.
But what about non-physical hard drive faults? If your hard drive has suffered from a logical failure, or you’ve accidentally deleted some data, then it could be worth running data recovery software to try and solve the problem and get your data back. You should install a piece of software as soon as possible; installing it after your data has been lost runs the risk of it being overwritten and gone forever. If you haven’t installed some data recovery software and you need to use it, install it to a different disk than the one you’re trying to recover data from.
The best chance of getting your data back, however, is to leave data recovery to the professionals!
