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DIY Data Recovery

If your data is valuable to you then we strongly recommend using a professional data recovery company to recover your data.

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Data recovery is all about salvaging data from formatted, damaged, failed, wrecked or inaccessible storage media. Data loss occurs due to various reasons and data recovery salvages data from media such as hard disk drives, digital cards, tape drives, pen drives, CDs, DVDs, RAID etc. Data Recovery involves setting right the physical damage caused to the storage device or logical damage caused by the operating system. Further, data recovery plays a very important role in forensics, helping investigators unravel crimes. Data Recovery has a fairly high rate of success and though the reasons for data loss range from power surges, static electricity, sabotage, viruses to fires, floods and formatting, experts are able to retrieve data in most cases.

Data Loss and Data Recovery

Statistics reveal that the main reason for data loss is because of hardware malfunction which makes up 44% of all data loss. User error -32%, software corruption -14%, Computer viruses - 7%, Natural Disasters -3 % are the other major reasons for data loss. Whatever be the reason, there are data recovery solutions that can retrieve data. Professional data recovery services can recover data from different operating systems like Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris or UNIX. The process of recovery is highly specialized and painstaking. There are times when data recovery can be fairly straight forward and just involves plugging the hard drive into an external adapter and then plugging it into another computer. However, when the situation is complicated, the process of data recovery involves different tools and expertise to retrieve the data. It could be because the Master Boot Record or Master File Table are corrupt. In such a case there is specific software that can rewrite partitions, rebuild the Master File Table or even repair the dysfunctional Master Boot Record. While to an amateur the process can seem intimidating, trained professionals can carry out the process in an exact manner to retrieve lost data. In the case of mission critical files, trying to use DIY software and apparent simple recovery steps can go terribly wrong. The need of the hour is to hand over the task to professionals who will use sophisticated and expensive machinery to save the data.

The Process of Data Recovery

Physical damage to a storage device almost always results in some kind of data loss. Physical damage cannot be repaired by regular users. Opening up the hard drive could cause dust to settle in and worsen the situation. In such cases it is best to hand over the damaged storage device to a professional company. These companies have Class 100 clean rooms which provide a controlled environment to recover data. The extracted image is used to reconstruct data after the resulting logical damage has been repaired. Physical recovery procedures could involve replacing a damaged printed circuit board with a new one, changing the damaged read/write heads, removing hard disk platters and installing them into a healthy drive etc. These are technical procedures and should not be attempted by common users. Logical damage resulting in data loss is a fairly common occurrence. Logical damage leaves a file system in an inconsistent state. Third party utilities are used to recover data in these circumstances. One of the main techniques involves scanning the logical structure of the disk and ensuring that it is consistent with specifications or installing the operating system on a separate partition from the user data. Another technique for file system repair assumes very little about the state of the file system and instead tries to re-build it from scratch. The entire drive is scanned to provide information on the system’s DNA. Even when logical structures are completely destroyed, recovery procedures can extract data and transfer it to a different storage medium.

The High Cost of Recovery

As mentioned earlier, to ensure that data recovery is not hampered by dust and other pollutants in the environment, companies construct clean rooms. These clean rooms are equipped with all the necessary machinery for recovery while also being temperature controlled and totally dust free. These clean rooms are expensive to construct and maintain. The professionals who are hired to carry out data recovery are highly trained experts whose services do not come cheap. Good data recovery companies like to hire only the best to ensure service of the highest standard. Considering the expense that a data Recovery company incurs to offer good service, it is justified then that the cost to the end user too is high. However, since lost data is usually valuable, recovering it, even at a high price is well worth it.

Recovering Deleted Files

We’ve all done it – deleted files when we didn’t mean to. Whether it’s accidentally dropping them in the Recycle Bin, hitting Delete instead of Save or deleting something in DOS without thinking things through first, we’ve experienced that jaw-dropping realization that we’ve lost work. And you may have experienced even more horror at a hard-drive crash.

However, it’s very rare that those files are completely deleted for good. Even when something really catastrophic does happen – that is, your hard drive seizes – there are professionals that can work digital miracles on your equipment to resurrect the data.

There are programs that can access your lost data, whether you’ve deleted it, Windows has crashed, or even when you can’t access your hard drive at all. Data recovery companies that can help when all seems lost.

Of course, this sort of nightmare can be avoided altogether if you make regular backups.

Recovering lost data in Windows

You’ve accidentally deleted or lost a file. Here’s how you can recover it…
This can be the most annoying kind of data loss, simply because the file has usually been deleted because of user error. The important thing here, as with any kind of data recovery, is to keep calm, and think about what you’re doing. Act rashly and you make it harder to recover that file.

The first place you should look after deleting a file is the Recycle Bin. It may seem a little obvious, but this back-up facility can be overlooked. If your file is in there, right-click it and select Restore from the menu. Of course, the Recycle Bin doesn’t catch every file deletion, with files that have been deleted in DOS being a particular oversight. There are utilities that will cover this inadequacy, but if you’re in DOS, then merely knowing that a deletion could be permanent should have you in the right frame of mind.

The Restoration
An option you have at your disposal is to use an Undelete utility. To understand how these work, it helps if you have a little background knowledge of what happens when you delete a file. Windows stores file data in clusters, with the size of those clusters being determined by the type of file allocation table (FAT) you’ve set up to use. The FAT stores the links between clusters, which when connected together, make up each file. Some of the most basic file errors occur when this file becomes corrupt, and simple utilities such as ScanDisk can usually piece together the file.

Hanging Around
When it comes to file deletion, the important thing to realize is that the file isn’t actually removed from your hard drive. All that happens is that the files directory location is changed so that it points at the Recycle Bin instead. The data clusters for the file aren’t changed at all. You may think that this information is deleted when you empty the Recycle Bin, or when you bypass the Recycle Bin. But again, the actual data in the clusters is left intact, only this time the entry for the file in the FAT is updated so that those clusters are now free to be used and the first character of the file name is changed to reflect this.

A Quick Recovery
Programs that can recover these files do so by searching through the FAT for entries that have been flagged, and also by scanning the hard drive for clusters that look like they may be files. The most basic of these programs used to be part of the Microsoft OS, namely the Undelete.exe, but since the introduction of the Recycle Bin, Microsoft has stopped supplying the program. There are loads of utilities out there that will perform a similar function under more recent versions of Windows.

Recommended Hard Drive Utilities

HDDScan: Windows based Program for low-level HDD diagnostics, Supports SCSI, IDE, and Serial ATA hard disk drives. Also supports Flash cards, RAID arrays, and USB/Firewire hard disks.

MHDD: The most popular program for low-level hare disk drive diagnostics. MHDD supports SCSI, IDE, and Serial ATA. Note: This is a CD image file. You will need to burn it into a CD with your favorite CD burning software.

Free Data Recovery Software

PC INSPECTOR™ smart recovery is the new data recovery program from CONVAR for Flash Card™, Smart Media™, SONY Memory Stick™, IBM™ Micro Drive, Multimedia Card, Secure Digital Card or any other data carrier for digital cameras.

If you have unintentionally deleted or formatted pictures, videos or sound files on your data carrier or have pulled it out during a write operation, no matter - PC INSPECTOR™ smart recovery can easily, quickly and absolutely reliably reconstruct the lost data.

Using the software is child's play. PC INSPECTOR™ smart recovery runs on all Win 9x, ME, NT 4.0, XP and Windows™ 2000 systems.

Undelete Plus is a quick and effective way to retrieve accidentally deleted files, files removed from the Recycle Bin, in a DOS window, from a network drive, from Windows Explorer with the SHIFT key held down.

Undelete Plus works under Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 operating systems. The program supports all Windows file systems for hard and floppy drives including FAT12/16/32,NTFS/NTFS5 and image recovery from CompactFlash, SmartMedia, MultiMedia and Secure Digital cards.

Recuva (pronounced "recover") is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses!

Ultimate Data Recovery will help you rescue your lost or inaccessible files from any imaginable data recovery disaster.

Have you accidentally deleted important files from your hard drive, or your hard drive became corrupted, losing all or some of your important data, files, and folders?

As long as your system's hardware is functional, award winning Ultimate Data Recovery may be an only solution you need for all your data recovery and undelete needs. With do-it-yourself data recovery product Ultimate Data Recovery you can quickly and easily restore your files saving your time, money and resources.

Ultimate Data Recovery works by analyzing your disk on a bit-by-bit level. This means it sees things that regular Windows programs can't. It then uses it's built-in intelligence to spot deleted files... and then attempts to recover them, so you can work with them as normal.

Ultimate Data Recovery works with practically all disks currently in use. As a general guide, if you can see it in Windows Explorer, you can use it with Ultimate Data Recovery - including FAT 12/16/32 and NTFS (including compressed and encrypted) partitions.

TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software. It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting your Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.

TestDisk has features for both novices and experts. For those who know little or nothing about data recovery techniques, TestDisk can be used to collect detailed information about a non-booting drive which can then be sent to a tech for further analysis. Those more familiar with such procedures should find TestDisk a handy tool in performing onsite recovery.

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures (thus, its 'Photo Recovery' name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the file system and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's file system has been severely damaged or re-formatted.

There are other versions available at the authors site which support DOS, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,

SunOS and MacOS.

Disk Investigator: A program that can also help you to recover lost data. Display the true drive contents by bypassing the operating system and directly reading the raw drive sectors. View and search raw directories, files, clusters, and system sectors. Verify the effectiveness of file and disk wiping programs. Undelete previously deleted files.

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