File Recovery: Preventing Further Damage

Written by Ken Roberts, Atlanta, Georgia.

File recovery does not have to be some sort of daunting task for you. Provided you take some fairly immediate steps in response to a problem - and avoid taking some other steps that might aggravate the situation - changes are solid that you will be able to resolve a your situation.

There are four important factors to consider

1. Close any documents that you may have open.
2. Unplug your computer at once.
3. Do not initiate and run the system recovery disk from the manufacturer.
4. Do not install any recovery program on the computer which you desire to recover data.

Close Important Documents

Closing any important documents or files that you may have opened or are running on your compute will prevent any file corruption. So many people just try to restart the computer whenever there is a problem, and this is one of the worst things you can do in file recovery.

Unplug Your Computer

If you are like most people, you've been warned more than once about not cutting the power supply to your computer. That is good advice when all is well. However, if you are facing a situation involving with lost, deleted, damage or corrupted files, you need to unplug your computer at once. In other words, you should not - must not - have your computer go through the normal 'shutting down' process.

The effect of having the computer run through the standard shut down protocol may cause the file or data that you need to recover to be written over with new data. If this happens, file recovery is no longer a solution.

Do Not Run Manufacturer's Recovery Disk

A natural inclination that many people do have is to run the system recovery disk that is provided by the manufacturer. This is a dangerous proposition if you want a successfully file recovery. This software specifically is designed to get your computer as a whole running appropriately again, with no respect to your data. This means, you will probably lose all of your data after using the recovery disk.

Do Not Install Any Recovery Programs

Finally, if you've taken the step of obtaining file recovery software, do not install it onto the computer with the problem. By doing this, it could actually end up overwriting the file that you are trying to recover in the first place. The smarter option is to install the file recovery software onto some other storage device and run the program from there. Any questions? Need file recovery services? Contact me in Atlanta at our 1-800 number, or through email.