Most people don’t think about backing up vital data until it is too late and then one day they find that their critical data, like the client and inventory data bases, e-mails, personal pictures and other records, cannot be accessed. They are then forced to hire a specialized data recovery company to salvage at least some of the critical data. This would not have happened if they understood the reasons of data loss and essentials of data recovery.

Basically, there are two types of failure in hard drives—physical and logical. If the hard drive cannot be detected by the BIOS, then a physical failure may have occurred. Physical failure can be electronic or mechanical. The hard drive has a circuit board, through which it interfaces with the computer. Electronic failure may occur due to a faulty component or improper installation.

Mechanical failure usually occurs due to the breakdown of the spindle motor. This may happen due to overheating caused by bearing failure. The excessive heat can cause the spindle motor to seize. At times you may hear a whining, grinding or a high pitched screech and you need to back up your data at once. You must also keep your computer clean and ventilated, to avoid the build up of heat. Your hard drive works very hard and that’s why it has its own fan to keep cool.

A logical failure may occur due to file system corruption. This may happen due to key files or registry components being accidentally deleted or due to a virus or electrostatic discharge. Usually, when logical failure occurs, the hard drive will still be recognized by the BIOS, but it will not boot. More often than not, the data on the drive will still be unharmed, even if it appears to be inaccessible.

Data recovery services have the necessary expertise and a wide range of hardware and software tools for recovering data. These services first evaluate a drive to determine whether they are dealing with logical failure or physical failure. It may take between 2 and 4 business days to deal with logical failure and between 5 and 10 days to deal with physical issues.

If you are quite computer savvy, you can consider using data recovery software. But you should not use software that writes data to the damaged disk as this may lead to overwriting. You should also avoid buying low-priced software because its capacity to recover data may be limited.

Also, you must switch off power, without going through the shutdown procedure, if you think that your hard disk has crashed. This will reduce the magnitude of data loss.

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