So one of the worst things for anyone who uses a computer, especially someone whos job revoles around the computer, is a catostrphic loss of data — namely a hard drive failure. These failures come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes it’s as simple as some bad sectors and other times it can be bent discs or heads in the drives. Well, this happened to me two days ago. Lucky for me, it was my secondary laptop and I keep backups of most of my data. Unfortunately for me, the last backup I had was from about 2 months ago. A lot happens on my computer over the span of two months. This is where data recovery software comes in.
It all began two years ago when a user came to me and told me that their hard drive crashed. I was shocked to find that they had heard a clicking sound for about 3 months before the computer just “wouldn’t start” anymore. This user was someone with a lot of pull in the company and contrary to our company policy — keep all the data on the network drive — they had all of their’s on the hard drive. I had no option but to somehow recover this data. I was ready to send it out to one of the big guys like DriveSavers who were going to charge me around $2000 plus another $250 to “give” me a hard drive with it. But unfortuately it was the way that things had to be… Or so I thought.
Now before I get into the tools that I used to get this data back, I don’t want to downplay the use of a commercial data recovery specialist. Someone like DriveSavers or OnTrack have a time and place. They are very helpful when Joe from accounting walks over with the hard drive that was dropped in the lake, lit on fire and then run over by the four-wheeler but we are talking about a drive that just make some “small clicking sounds” as my user had put it. And that’s where RecoverMyFiles came in.
I began the process by trying to connect the drive to my machine and booting into my copy of Windows. Unfortuantely for me, chkdisk was no help as the machine was not even recognizing the drive. After this, I booted into a copy of Ubuntu and attempted to see if Linux would be a bit more helpful in locating the drive. This whole time, the drive was showing up in the BIOS, just not in the OS itself. No luck on that occasion. Finally after a bit of search and playing with different utilities online, I came across RecoverMyFiles. The program offered a free demo copy so I downloaded and installed in on my machine. The program showed me a quick wizard to recover the drive or a large group of files and after a few no-brainer choices, it was on its way. 10 minutes rolled by and 40GB of data showed up in a folder on my desktop as if the drive had never even stopped. I was in shock. There was no problem with the drive not showing up in Windows or the fact that I couldn’t even run chkdisk on it. It just seemed to work. This one even caused me to immediately purchase a copy of this program. And that leads me two years down the line to the other day…
I popped open the RecoverMyFiles software, connected the dead hard drive from my laptop and pulled down 66GB of data that was on my drive. There was one folder that it was unable to recover but that was alright with me. It saved me a lot of time and energy that could now be spent on more important things — like posting this entry. This post has two morals to it, lucky you!
Number 1 - When your drive seems like it might be going (since you always run disk checking utilities and disk defragmentation weekly like a good computer savvy person), back it up and get a new one; and
Number 2 - Keep a copy of good data recovery software on hand as you’ll never know when it might come in real handy.
