Recovery Disks: Saving Your Data

Recovery disks may not be part of your mainstream vocabulary, you may not even know what they are, but the day you lose some data that you want back, you will almost worship that little file recovery program. I know because I have been there, having recovered my wedding photos with my wife breathing down my neck in the background.

Are You There Right Now?

Before you start downloading recovery disks - yes, this will be your first step in data recovery - here is a fair warning: Do not use any system recovery disk provided by your computer manufacturer. These recovery disks contain a complete copy of the contents that are installed on your hard drive when you bought it. While these recovery disks can be useful when you want to restore your entire computer from scratch, but when it comes to recovering files, this is your worst enemy.

Data Recovery Disks

Recovery disks can be of particular use when you have experienced what is known by experts as "logical damage" to your computer. Logical damage occurs when the file system can no longer communicate with the operating system, resulting in not being able to find your files. They may still be there, but you computer cannot locate them. That is why you need recovery disks that can locate and restore data.

Deleted, lost, and damaged files are all examples of needing recovery disks to perform harddisk recovery. In the products area you can find multiple choices that can be downloaded and then tried before they are buyed to test whether your data can be recovered. No sense paying for something until you know it is going to work, right?

Disk Recovery Service

Do it yourself recovery disks cannot resolve your problem if you have a situation involving a damaged hard disk drive. The way you know if you are at this point is when all recovery disks fail to access your files, or when you encounter a blue or black screen when booting to your computer. When this occurs, you only have one option available to you: disk recovery service.

Determining which disk recovery company to send your drive to is a task in itself. I say this because the sheer number of companies that are invoked on the search engines for recovery disks, and also because most people think this kind of service is available at the local computer shop.

Disk recovery professionals are few and far apart; they are probably not even in your state. Sure, if you have a basic logical problem, your local technician can probably recover your data. But, if you have damage to you hard drive, you need a disk recovery expert to do the recovery for you.

Where To Begin

I believe most computer users can use recovery disks to do their own hard disk data recovery, so long as the hard disk is functioning properly. The step are usually clearly laid out in the manual, and in some cases, you do not need one because the progam is so easy to use. Saying that, using an expert when recoering your data is dire is the smartest option.