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Have you managed to delete important data from your hard drive?  There should be no reason to worry as there are many data recovery solutions on the market capable of recovering your lost data for you, the key, when using software to recover your files is to follow a process that prevents any further harm coming to your data.

There are some important rules to adhere to when using data recovery software for recovering lost files:

Firstly and a big mistake many people make is not to install the software on the same computer you have been using, why? If you have deleted the file when you install any further software or save anything back to the disk, as the operating system will use what it considers free space to load the program you could end up overwriting the document or part of the document you are trying to recover.

Secondly, has your drive been making any strange sounds recently, if the answer is yes your hard drive may be failing so a recovery company would be better suited to recover your data to be on the safe side.

Thirdly whilst in all probability your prime focus will be to get your data back as soon as possible avoid the temptation to suddenly dive right in and purchase some software straight away. Most file recovery software will offer a free trial so at the very least you can do a scan to see if the document is actually still recognisable on your hard disk or even recoverable for that matter.

Assuming your drive is exhibiting no signs of failure and having used the software you have managed to find the file (intact) and it is recoverable you’ll now need to save the data somewhere. Under no circumstances save it back to the same drive as you may end up saving the data on back to the same area that the data is being recovered from resulting in a corrupted file.

If the recovery software has already reserved a disk area to write files back to some of the data can get overwritten especially if the drive is heavily fragmented.

If your data is simply too valuable to trust in the hands of software, particularly if you are not familiar with the data recovery software and the manner in which it works, it is sensible to contact a data recovery professional.

The cost for the recovery of files from a hard disk by a professional data recovery organisation is now in most cases comparable to the cost of the full version of the software that you have tried, plus you are normally backed up by a no recovery – no fee guarantee.

And lastly, if you choose to use a data recovery company, it is always worth ascertaining what will happen if the drive fails during a recovery process, will they be able to fix it themselves in a proper clean room environment or will they need to send it away to another data recovery company?

If they do not have the facilities for hard drive recovery and there is any sign of mechanical failure then a main data recovery expert company will be your best option.

Many of us slightly older folk will still remember the humble floppy disk which was the computing industries first real mobile storage media for the mainstream user and when first introduced was an ideal way of transferring data across computers, as long as you did not mind formatting the disk or re-writing it a number of times because of corruption on the first few attempts.

USB 1.0 which was first introduced in 1996 was still an emerging standard so if we had a larger file we had to span the data across many floppies which I remember was a real pain at the time.

But as files grew larger the floppy simply did not make the grade, but as time passed the CD writer came of age which could hold a hefty 500mb of data, still a little more than most people required and media was originally quite dear as well.

USB was making rapid gains fortunately and manufacturers were coming up with many new uses for this very user friendly (operating system permitting) plug and play capability, and the pen drive was borne not a moment to soon in my opinion. Mobile data transfer capacity rocketed upwards from a humble 2mb and it did not seem too long until the capacity of USB pen drives surpassed that of the CD.

The business computer support and IT industries where some of the first serious adopters of pen drives primarily due to the fact that system tools could be easily carried on a flash drive and with the larger capacities reduced the need to carry around a number of CD disks used for diagnostics or computer maintenance utilities.

Increased capacities then drove the need for higher data transfer speeds and it was not long before USB 2.0 and then Hi-speed USB appeared and filled the need for speed

The emergence of USB 2.0 and hi speed USB was a bit of a debacle for many consumers however as many USB pen drives and PCI cards were sold at the time claiming to be USB 2.0 but it was not made clear that the devices still only had the transfer speeds of 12mbps as opposed to 480 mbps.The problem was so widespread that many countries trading standards bodies were involved due to consumer lobbying for clearer packaging.

All of that seems lost in the past know as the standard has emerged and is widely accepted by many as the de facto transfer protocol although the firewire camp would disagree but as technology matures time will tell.

The USB pen drive has really risen to the challenge to take advantage of the USB interface and storage capacities are enormous and far beyond most peoples requirements, What were almost in the beginning icons of your technical prowess have now become a mainstream device and sales are said to exceed 150 million units per year just for pen drives alone. The USB interface is also said to be present in over 6 billion consumers devices and this number is growing at over 30% per annum.

Increases in drive capacities has raised a number of issues across many industry sectors including the data recovery industry, which has had to evolve new USB memory recovery techniques for recovering data from these flash based devices.

Transferring data has become so easy that scant regard has been paid to data backup and equally in the drive to manufacture cheaper products manufacturing standards appear to have slipped resulting in memory controller errors, which of course in turn has led to an increase of lost data.

Some Data recovery companies have of course stepped up the mark and the USB data recovery industry is now alive and well.

Another problem area with plug and play devices is that of data security and the sheer ease of file transfer has given many business and government bodies severe data security headaches resulting in extreme cases to the USB interface being disabled on computers, Pc’s and laptops in security sensitive environments.

As it seems with all technology every development brings us even greater speed and the new USB 3.0 standard is no exception promising data transfer speed 10x greater than current specs which will give us transfer speeds around 5Gbps.

This very fast transfer speed may of course signal the end of the older firewire standard which has been falling behind more recently.

The USB 3.0 standard has now been rolled out and accepted by most mainstream technology players but it may be still be some months before we see any consumer based products or reasonably priced motherboards supporting this latest standard.

When money is tight often we are all tempted to do those little repairs that we would other wise get professional help to do and data recovery is no exception. Quite often data recovery are presented with hard drives that have been opened in an unsafe environment and also drive that have sustained further data loss through incorrect use of DIY recovery software.

In most cases this software will be a hard drive recovery programme for a hard disk drive that has suffered from some form of logical table corruption and will not assist with

1. Mechanically failed devices
2. Degraded hard Disk Drives
3. Devices with electronic failures

This software will of course not be able to help and if the drive is degraded or suffering from a mechanical failure attempting to run this software will in most cases cause further damage to hard disk drives, potentially making the disk unrecoverable.

The software itself is very often very reasonable priced – usually under $100 but is only good for one purpose to recover either deleted or logically failed drives, so if you are not sure what you are doing trying to do a self recovery can in the long run cost a lot more.

In a recent case a teacher brought in a laptop hard disk drive which had been previously diagnosed by the schools own IT department. The teacher concerned had done exactly what any person probably would do and trusted that the onsite IT dept at the school would have a degree of knowledge and competence when dealing with a suspected HDD failure. Unfortunately the opposite seems to be the norm in many cases.

In a typical case a drive was initially presented for diagnosis and duly diagnosed with a blown PCB - the drive seemed completely dead and would not spin at all. As an additional test a new PCB was placed on the board so that the response of the heads could be tested. The result of the diagnosis was that the hard drive read heads had been damaged following a power spike.

Upon further discussion, with the client, it transpired that the IT dept had decided to remove the HDD from the laptop and as it was an IDE device mount it as an external storage device by using an IDE connector. Unfortunately they plugged the HDD to the connector “upside down” meaning that crucially the drive received a huge power spike through it when the connector was hooked up to a PC.

It may well have been in this particular scenario that the actual problem could have been no more a few bad sectors on the disk, however due to a certain level of incompetence within this department what originally was more than likely a simple job for a data professional turned into a much more costly full drive rebuild.

Naturally the client is somewhat annoyed that his data, whilst probably still recoverable, is likely to cost much more and take longer in the recovery process.

Unfortunately most Data Recovery Companies will probably have their own tales of customer mishap or IT Technicians making their job more difficult through there well intentioned but often misinformed knowledge of hard disk drive technology.

So the moral of this is that whilst many people will look for a quick and cheap fix for their hard drive recovery problems, they really are best leaving it to the experts.

Removing data from a hard drive, permanently, is something that sounds an awful lot simpler than it proves to be in reality. As we all know deleting a file does not remove the file or its content from the hard drive permanently, data recovery companies can normally aid in the recovery of such files, no doubt other less scrupulous individuals are equally capable of such recovery feats.

So what lengths do we need to go to in order to ensure that our data is securely removed?

The answer, in short, is that there is no easy method of permanently removing data from a storage media. This does not make it impossible, but does mean that you will normally have to obtain expensive software to help in the task.

In order to completely erase data on a drive it is best to overwrite the original several times but not necessarily using the same methodology on each rewrite. Using a method that involves numerous passes over the data either using specialist software or with a manual process that adheres to recognized data erasure standards will under most circumstances guarantee that the data has been successfully erased.

There are many companies that can provide such data elimination services, and there are also a number of software applications that can serve the process including Evidence Eliminator, M-Sweep Pro Data Eliminatior and R-Wipe software from the company behind R-Studio Data Recovery Software.

There are also more permanent methods of data destruction, few data recovery companies can retrieve data from a hard drive where the disk’s platters have been physically destroyed.

If you wish to attempt this yourself, it is important to note that the platters within the device should be completely destroyed, this means bending, scratching, smashing, shattering or whatever else seems reasonable to completely annihilate the hard disk platter.

There will always be those that are less educated in the filed of data recovery that will have you believe that simply formatting your drive or even conducting a low level format will do the trick. Sadly this is simply not the case. Another common myth is that reinstalling the operating system will suffice but that will remain the myth that it is.

If your data is business critical or extremely sensitive, always ensure that you can have the data certifiably removed from the storage media, whether that media be Flash Memory device, a hard disk drive, a RAID Array, Floppy Disk or CD / DVD Optical Media often only a professional can help you.

Your local data recovery company will be able to advise you on safe hard drive recovery data disposal methods and will probably have a local service. data recovery and data disposal should always be left to professional operators who are happy to certify their work.