Losing data from your computer or smartphone is not a pleasant experience. Your beautiful vacation photos or other files with essential data may be lost in many ways. It can all be accidentally deleted by you or due to hardware failure, computer formatting, or malware action.
It does not matter if you work on the latest computer model or have worn-out equipment. Components can fail in any of them. Simply put, nothing lasts forever. Nevertheless, do not worry because even if your hardware fails and you lose relevant data, you can recover it from the hard drive yourself, using dedicated programs.
Restoring deleted data may seem hard to carry out, but it should not give you trouble if you decide to use special programs. If you lost your company’s data on your business computer, it might be best to let professional IT specialists do the restoring work. However, regardless of whether you want to recover data by yourself or plan to send the disk to specialists, there are a few essential points to keep in mind, which we present in this article.
Free Data Recovery Program
If you’ve lost some vital data on your PC or mobile device, try to use the best free backup software from Minitool, a professional restoring, cloning and backup program. It allows you to recover many different files and search deleted folders and recover files they contain – you can also restore an entire lost folder.
Restored files are sorted by their extension, so you can easily find the ones you are looking for. The program works on Windows (Vista and newer) and Mac OS, as well as on iOS and Android.
A program that is compatible with all the smartphone operating system versions is the one you need to recover lost messages, contacts, photos, and notes.
How Does it Work?
Lost data can be recovered, sometimes even completely. It is possible because the deleted data is not actually erased. Those disk sectors are only marked as deleted and ready to be overwritten with new data.
They appear in the system as free space, but these sectors still contain previously saved data. Thus, it is possible to recover them until they are overwritten with a new piece of information.
The most important thing is not to use the disk until the data recovery software is ready. In this way, we will minimize the risk of overwriting the data that we want to get back. Recovering data on a laptop or computer is not a complicated process when you have an efficient, dedicated program.
What to Remember When You Want to Restore Data
If data has been lost due to formatting the drive, do not overwrite anything on it. It is not advisable to download any programs and files to the disk, as they may overwrite the key sectors of the drive and make it difficult or even impossible to recover the lost data.
If the drive has been corrupted or formatted by mistake, shut down the computer. Data recovery should be performed on another device to which the disk will be connected as an additional one. Make sure your device is not running automatic disk defragmentation or automatic system recovery.
If you were able to find the lost data by recovering it, make sure that you are saving it on another disk, where you can check its condition. If you don’t know whether your data is safe yet, keep it on the next external drive just to be 100% sure. You can’t be too precautious.
Advice for the Future: Backup
It can sound frustrating now, as you’ve just lost your data, and backup won’t change a thing, but you will appreciate this feature later. Some people make backups regularly, but some are only motivated to start doing it no sooner than after experiencing the pain of data loss.
Make sure that your files are regularly backed up. In this way, you will not have to worry even if your device fails you.
Apart from cloud backups, it is also worth having a local inventory. Be it on a few different disks – preferably those that you keep in different places.
Summary
Hard drive data loss is one of the worst scenarios that can become a reality for any computer and smartphone user. Prudent and preventive people make regular backups, but even in this case, you may lose the latest files that have not been archived yet.
Recovering videos, photos, documents, and other types of data may seem complicated, but it is worth undertaking if it concerns exclusive, necessary data. With the dedicated software, it is not that hard to conduct it yourself, so you do not even have to pay for a data recovery service. But next time, remember to back up regularly!
Author – Paula Sieracka