How to recover deleted or lost files

By: Julian Moss

It's a horrible feeling, the moment you realise that some
important document, or irreplaceable photos have vanished from
your computer. But that is no reason to despair. The chances are
that the data is still present, even if you know you deleted it.
Your computer operating system just does not know how to find it
any more.

The four most common reasons for data loss are:

* Deletion. You deleted the file by accident during a
disk cleanup, or because you thought it was no longer required.
It is not in the Recycle Bin. However, the data will still exist
until the space it occupied on the disk is are-used by another
file.

* Overwriting. You saved a new file over the top of the
old one. However, the old data may still exist, and be
recoverable.

* File system corruption. The disk suddenly appears
empty, or the file and folder names contain gibberish. The files
probably still exist, but the pointers to them have been lost or
corrupted and the operating system cannot find them.

* Physical damage or hardware failure. You receive error
messages when you try to read the disk, or it is not recognised
by the computer at all. The data is still likely to be present
on the disk itself, but the drive is incapable of accessing it.

In each case, there is a good chance that the data still exists.
The computer operating system isn't able to see it, but data
recovery software may be able to. If the problem is a hardware
failure then a data recovery service may be able to get back the
data using special equipment.

Prepare for data recovery

There is one cardinal rule of data recovery: for the best chance
of recovering the files you must not write any new data to the
disk they were stored on. The old data will only remain on the
disk until the space it occupied is used by another file. If the
disk is your computer's main drive, then the drive is being
written to all the time. You should turn off the computer
immediately, and use another computer to search for a solution
to recover your data. You should put your computer's hard disk
in another computer to do the data recovery, or use data
recovery that runs from a CD or floppy disk, because installing
the data recovery software on the drive could overwrite the very
data you want to recover.

Choosing the data recovery method

Data recovery tools use different methods to try to recover
data. Some tools are designed for recovering deleted files,
others are better at restoring overwritten files, or recovering
files from disks that are physically damaged. Some data recovery
software products have been developed specifically for
recovering photo images, or Microsoft Word or Excel document
files. Such products may succeed where others fail because they
understand what these files look like, and can recognise their
data when other clues to its existence have vanished.

It can be difficult to choose the most appropriate data recovery
method. Because of this, Tech-Pro has created a website called
Get Data Back (http://www.get-data-back.com). The site has a
Data Recovery Wizard that asks questions about the data you have
lost and how it was lost, and then recommends the product that
is most likely to be successful. It will also advise you if it
would be better to use a professional data recovery service.
Give the Get Data Back data
recovery site a try if you need to recover lost files.

This article is Copyright © 2006 Julian Moss. Reprint freely.

About the author:
Julian Moss is director of Tech-Pro Limited
(http://www.tech-pro.net), your trusted source for Windows
software, information and troubleshooting advice.