Data Recovery and Causes of Data Loss

Although processing and storing data on a computer is efficient, cheaper and easier, proper care should be taken to protect it from damage. For example, imagine a financial institution having credit and debit information of all the customers stored on a computer. If the company does not have any copy of these data elsewhere and the computer breaks down, there would be no way they could track down these information details. As a result, there is a risk of not knowing who are the creditors and debtors and the company stands a chance of going bankrupt.

Causes of data loss

The information on a computer is stored on hard drive. Data loss on a hard drive could happen due to a variety of reasons and some of them are as follows:

• Virus on the computer


• Formatting of the hard drive


• Physical damages to the drive


• Hard drive head crash


• User might have inadvertently deleted the data on the drive


• Power failure before the user could save the file

The data could also be stored on removable media such as CD, floppy or pen drive. The data on these devices could also be lost due to some of the above reasons. The loss of crucial data necessitated the need for a means to recover them and this led to the development of various techniques to retrieve the data.

Data Recovery: The Process Involved

As the name implies, data recovery is the process of retrieving the data from a crashed hard drive or storage device. There are various methods that can be employed for data recovery depending upon the type and severity of data loss. For example, when data on a hard drive is lost due to software corruption by virus, data recovery is usually done through parallel reinstallation. In this process, a fresh copy of the operating system is installed without deleting the existing one. Since the previous copy of operating system has crashed, the data stored in the hard drive is accessed and retrieved through the new copy of operating system.

People generally assume that data recovery is not possible in a lot of cases such as data loss due to power failure or formatting of hard drive. However, in most of these cases, data can be retrieved with the assistance of a data recovery expert. There is also data recovery software available in the market that helps you with the process even without the assistance of an expert.

Service Offerings

There are various companies providing data recovery services in the market. However, it is important to choose a reliable data recovery company. Otherwise, you run the risk of losing your data forever or end up paying more than what it is worth.

Fields Data Recovery has been in this industry since 1992 and has its presence in a lot of countries around the globe. Excellent recovery rate and high profile clients such as IBM, Reuters, Warner Brothers Entertainment, etc. stand as a symbol of credible service offered by them. They provide quality service in recovering data from hard drive and all types of removable media.

Precautionary Measures

Instead of losing your important data and then worrying about retrieving it, you could try to prevent the problem even before it strikes. Here are some of the useful tips to avoid data loss:

1. Always have a back up of your important data. This way even if you lose the data on the hard drive you can use the copy of it stored on the CD.
2. While travelling with your laptop or moving your desktop, be careful to avoid jerks that could disturb the hard drive head and cause data loss.
3. Virus mostly spreads through e-mail attachments and might destroy the data on your computer. So avoid opening e-mail attachments from strangers.
4. Have an updated copy of anti-virus software on your computer that can prevent virus attack.