Data Recovery

My Data is Gone, How Do I Recover It?

First, don't panic. Data is incredibly durable and seldom unrecoverable. In fact, it's extremely difficult to erase data when you want to. Government agents have recovered data from hard drives that have been reformatted and had new data written over their entire surfaces nine times or more! Your presentation is probably still there; the key to the storage locker is just a little bent out of shape, is all.

A data file's beginning contains header data that may get mixed up during a read/write head crash or some other minor disaster. Header data tells a program how to read the data in a file. Header data can be fixed, often with automated tools built into Windows.

Click Start, then Computer. Right-click on your hard drive's name (C: for example) and click on Properties in the resulting dialogue. Click on the Tools tab and you will see a "check disk for errors" button. Click it and check the "automatically fix errors" box. If you have lots of time, also check the "check disk for bad sectors" box, otherwise leave it unchecked. Click OK and go get a snack or something while Windows scans your entire drive and repairs errors in file headers as best it can.

Often, that's good enough. Try loading your presentation again. If that doesn't work, you may need a better locksmith.

Data Recovery Software

Here are several free data recovery utilities you can try:

Win Data Recovery recovers files emptied from the Recycle Bin; lost due to hard drive crash; a reformatted or damaged disk; virus infection; or other unknown reasons. It "supports recovery of all major file types including text, exl, pdf, bmp, exe, html, jpg, avi, mp3, etc." Note: that means it may not recover some nonstandard file type peculiar to your software or other specialized application.

DiskDigger is a similar Windows utility with the added ability to recover parts of files that have not been partially overwritten with other data. If you don't recover all of your file you may get at least some of it back, in other words. DiskDigger works fast because it does everything in RAM without writing recovered data to disk. You can preview recovered data before telling DiskDigger to save it to disk.

There are Mac data recovery utilities, most of them try-before-you-buy versions rather than pure freeware. Some such programs work fully during the evaluation period, while others recover data but won't let you save it until you pay the registration fee. Examples include FileSalvage by SubRosaSoft.com; Stellar Phoenix's Data Recovery Software 2.0; and Best Mac Data Recovery 1.0 by Recover Data.

In the very worst cases, a data recovery speciality consultant may need to take your hard drive apart and tinker with its physical parts. Such services are expensive, but good to know about. See my related article Hard Drive Recovery Services for more on that.

Do you have something to say about data recovery software or services? Post your comment or question below.