EDITORIALS

Lost Files and Data Recouvery

With working on a computer small problems arise. It goes with the territory. Occasionally these little problems turn into a full blown systems failures. So what do you do?
Well maybe you work with a tech that know their trade if your lucky and they get all or most of your data back. But what if you don't have a tech. You could call some one in for $50.00/hr or more and who are these people anyway.
Maybe you could take it to the place that sold you the computer. Chances are the tech there was hired because they could install hardware and software, and reformat a computer. When you tell them you lost critical data they tell you your out of luck and they'll have to reformat. Sorry your files are corrupt and there is no getting them back. This has happen to myself and to friend of mine.

So hold on, there are a few things you can do, all is not lost.

• First thing don't believe a tech that tells you your data is lost before they even look at the computer.
  
• When you have a system failure don't reformat, don't do a disk clean-up, don't defragment and don't start reinstalling the operating system. In fact if you don't know how to recover files shut the system, because everything you do could erase crucial information and then you real can't retrieve the lost data.
• A solution is to pull the hard drive that is corrupted out your computer, install it into another computer as a slave, and run a recovery program. Any half decent tech will know this stuff.
• If you don't know how to do this ask around find a tech who you have heard is wise in the ways of "Data Recovery".
• When the data is retrieved you'll have to go through the recovered files and find the information you want to keep and what you don't necessarily want. Backing up this information is a good idea. Now you can put the hard drive back into your computer, reformat the computer, and reinstall your software. Once that is all done you can transfer the backed up dat back on to your computer.

Depending on how much data you have, and how many programs you have to reinstall, this could take a couple of days. Face it when you have a systems crash it is painful and your going to lose time. But staying calm while not doing anything from an place of emotional anguish may save your cherished files.

Here are a couple of "Data Recovery Software" sites.

For Widows:
z-a-recovery
mcafee
bitmart.net

For Macs and Unix
stellarinfo
nucleustechnologies