Data recovery is a finely-tuned art that requires the skills and facilities to undertake successfully – don’t jeopardise your data by trying it at home!
We’re storing more and more data each year, so it’s inevitable that at some point, some of it will get lost. While it’s only natural to want to save some money by undertaking data recovery at home, we’d strongly advise against this in all but a handful of circumstances. At home, you won’t have the skills and facilities that a professional data recovery service has, and a botched data recovery attempt could render your data unrecoverable.
Let’s start with the scenarios where you could attempt data recovery at home, potentially to great success. Some logical failures – where you’re dealing with a fully working hard drive and your data is lost due to accidental deletion, for example – can be dealt with at home using data recovery software. This software looks for your data if it’s still physically written to your drive, but appears to be deleted. When data is deleted on a hard disk drive, what’s actually being deleted is the master file table reference, rather than the data itself. The space where the data is written is marked as free, ready for new data to be written. If you’ve accidentally deleted some data, there’s a chance it could still be recoverable using data recovery software. Similarly, many pieces of data recovery software can recover a lost partition, or repair a corrupt file. However, it’s advisable to have a data recovery program installed from the get-go, as installing it after you’ve lost your data could overwrite it.
If you suspect your hard drive has suffered from a physical fault such as a head crash or motor failure, then you should not attempt data recovery at home, whether that involves using software or taking the drive apart. At Data Recovery Specialists, our technicians undertake all physical data recovery in a class 100 clean room. Hard drives are not designed to be taken apart, and even a small particle of dust can cause havoc. A clean room environment ensures the air always contains fewer than one hundred particles per cubic foot. Our data recovery technicians also use specialist tools and have a library of more than 14,000 spare parts. Attempting physical data recovery at home is likely to lead to disaster.
