A Detailed Course of Action to Minimize the Adverse Effects of a Data Disaster

One of the worst situations to happen to anyone is facing data loss without having valid backups in place. Backups provide you a little hope that you are secured against any event of disaster that may strike in the near future. Backups are a part of your disaster recovery plan. They help you maintain business continuity and avoid situations of downtime and lost productivity. Even if you don’t have backups, you can try some of these workarounds to reduce the impact of data loss:

• If the drive that has suffered an unexpected failure is your book disk, you should detach it from your system. Do not try to reboot and continue working on the failed drive, as it can make the problem worse and lead to irrevocable data loss. You should not attempt to recover data yourself, if the information stored on the device is important to your business. In such cases, you can seek professional advice or send the media to a data recovery company.
• If the information stored on the failed drive is not consequential, you may try to attempt recovery yourself. This doesn’t imply you can take help of a system utility like ‘Chkdsk’, as fixing file system errors may result in data overwriting.
• If you identify that there are file system issues and other logical problems (such as virus infection, accidental data deletion), use a professional software to perform data recovery. Some people tend to save the recovered files on the same disk that has encountered corruption or data loss. This can expose you to the risk of overwriting already saved files, which leads to permanent loss of data.
• In case a physical damage has occurred to your hard drive, do not attempt to open its case and discover the problem yourself. You should immediately contact a data recovery service provider that has years of expertise in handling such cases of physical data loss.
• If your drive is failing due to bad sectors, do not use a recovery software to recover data on these sectors. An image of your drive should be created first and then used for data recovery.

Data recovery companies have state-of-the-art infrastructure and proprietary tools and techniques to retrieve your files intact in any case of physical damage to the media. These companies employ skilled engineers who have a working knowledge of such tools and techniques. Furthermore, hard drives are opened in Clean Room environment to provide high success rate in each data recovery endeavor.