3 Tips to Plan Ahead for Data Recovery from a Hard Drive

Most people have lost data from their hard drive at some point or other – either because of an accidental deletion, data corruption, or because the hard drive itself failed. But did you know that the best way to protect your data and improve its chances of being recovered is to actually plan ahead?

If you’d like to improve your chances of data recovery, there are a few tips in particular that could make a world of difference:

  • Build up a recovery toolkit in advance

Rather than waiting until you’ve lost data to look for recovery tools that you can use to restore it – you should build up a toolkit in advance. The reason for this is mainly because the last thing that you want to do once you’ve lost any data is to install new software that could potentially write over it and make the data loss permanent.

In short you should shop around and find a good recovery software and install it as soon as possible. That way if and when you lose any data you will be able to just run the recovery software and search for the data that you need without running the risk of writing over it.

  • Backup important files in various locations

The best way to make sure that you’re able to recover data that you’ve lost is if you have a backup that you can use to restore it at any point in time. While backing up your entire hard drive may not be feasible, at very least you should make it a point to back up important files in various locations.

Try getting into the habit of backing up any important files to several locations – such as a USB drive, or by uploading them onto the cloud. That way if they are ever lost or corrupted you just need to restore them from where they’re stored.

  • Make sure you have a bootable USB or CD

If your hard drive fails or its data is corrupted you may not be able to boot up your operating system in order to try to restore the data that is on it. That is why you should always make sure that you have a bootable USB or CD that you can use in such situations.

Ideally the bootable USB or CD should contain recovery tools as well, so that you can run a search for the data that you may have lost.

As you can see each one of these tips can help you to improve your chances of recovering data from your hard drive before it disappears forever. That being said in some cases running recovery software may not suffice, and you may need professional assistance to restore the lost data – unless you have a backup that you can use to restore it from. All said and done prevention is better than cure, but it helps to be prepared and plan ahead – just in case.

By Franklin Cedric