How to Recover Data When Your Hard Drive

Imagine this: you're busy working on your computer and need to access documents saved on your external hard drive. You connect it, get ready to find your data, and...nothing happens. Your hard drive isn't working. Uh oh. Before you panic, there are several things you can try on your own before calling in the pros.

Data loss can be due to a number of factors, but two are the most common. The first (and easiest to resolve) is software related. You've accidentally deleted an important folder and emptied the recycle bin, or gone and formatted the wrong drive by mistake. The second—and probably most common—cause of data loss is a fault with the hard drive itself. Given the complexity of modern drives it's no wonder that somewhere along the line something will go wrong. When the drive suffers from some form of failure there's often little that you can do yourself to get the data back—professional data recovery services are usually required. However, there are certain failures that you can attempt to resolve yourself.

Recover Your Data with Software

When dealing with a software data loss, the first and most important thing to keep in mind is not to work with the drive in question. Every second that the drive is connected to a running system is a second that you lose your chances at recovery. Your operating system is reading and writing to your drive constantly, whether you're actively doing something or not. Now that your system is seeing the deleted data as ‘free space' it will happily overwrite this area—along with your chances of recovery.

1. Shutdown the machine connected to the drive you've deleted data from. Now that your drive is ‘safe' you can make a clone of the drive and attempt the recovery from the clone. There are a number of ways to clone the drive, some easier and quicker than others.
2. Scan the clone with a few different recovery programs. There are numerous options here, both free and paid-for packages are available. Recuva is a good free option, while Zero Assumption Recovery works well if you want to splash out a few dollars.