It can happen to anybody at any time. I’ve seen it happen to the lazy and unprepared, and to the super meticulous type of person with OCD-like levels of organization and planning.
Data Loss, An Inevitable Problem
Anybody who spends any significant amount of time working with computers (and these days that’s practically everybody; it’s more than half of the planet by some estimations) is going to be faced with the specter of data loss. It’s inevitable. It’s not even a matter of if, it’s just a matter of when. Something’s going to disappear on you. Even if you’ve made multiple backups of everything, it will somehow be missing or damaged across ALL those backups.
The real question in this situations becomes simply “what are my options now?”
Options
The first situation is to just wash your hands of the whole matter and give up on the data, assuming it can never be recovered. Sometimes, reasonable alternatives can be found, or whatever it is that was lost can simply be recreated some way. This is of course dependent on how sensitive, how unique and how critical the loss was. But you probably wouldn’t be reading this article this far in if that were the case.
The good news is that there exists a quick fix solution that is perfect in many cases. I’m talking about data recovery software, software that can find and bring back to life files that were previously deleted. This software even works in cases where the media has been accidentally formatted.
You don’t have to rush your storage media any longer to a place where they take it into a sterile room and try their best to coax the lost data out of it, charging a very high hourly rate the whole time and causing a loss of productivity. In most cases, the recovery software will take care of it 100% for you. The sterile clean room is always there as a last-ditch option if nothing else works, naturally. But most of the time, as even the people working in the sterile room will usually admit to you, going to one of those places is overkill.
Next time you have an unfortunate incident with your all too important data, and it’s too important to just walk away from, consider the option of recovery software. You will almost certainly be pleasantly surprised.
