Unless you’re really unlucky, you’ll usually get some warning signs that your hard drive is developing a fault. It’s up to you to heed these warnings and power down your system immediately before it turns into a much more serious problem.
Recover Hard Drive Problems BEFORE They Occur
These are NOT our data recovery engineers. (We wish!)
If you can hear a clicking sound coming from your drive, you should immediately attempt to copy your entire hard drive’s contents onto a different, preferable external hard drive. This is a dead giveaway that your drive is about to crash. You really need to take note of such a warning – because in this condition on moment your drive might be working, and the next it may fail completely completely. Acting quickly is usually the best way to save your data.
If you need to recover data from hard drive units that are already locking up or making extremely loud clicking noises, you may be out of luck. At this point, your only choice is to power down your drive.
23% Of Permanent Hard Drive Data Losses Are Caused By Ignored Symptoms
It’s a harsh statistic, we know. But in our experience, ignoring hard drive crash symptoms is one of the worst things you can possibly do.
A free evaluation will help you best determine how to recover your drive. Get one here.
Is It Too Late For You?
If your hard drive has been damaged after being dropped down a flight of stairs or from any kind of height onto a hard surface, it can still be recovered. Additionally, drives that have suffered Power Surges are typically very inexpensive to recover data from.
A lot of people assume that hard disk drives that have seen extreme situations – a fire, a disk that was submersed in water, a drop from a major height – are more difficult to recover. This is not the case. In fact, a hard drive that has been run normally after a clicking sound has occurred is often far more difficult to recover, if only because the damage is usually continual and progressive.
There are lots of tools and techniques available for drive technicians to use. Sometimes it will take days of manual work to recover the lost data – whilst other times it may just take a few hours. Ultimately you need to put a value on your data that’s been lost. Is it going to be cost effective to pay hundreds of dollars to get it back? Or are you better off just cutting your losses, learning your lesson, and backing up weekly in future. It really is up to you.
The earlier you identify problems with your hard drive, the easier and cheaper they are to fix. If you nip the problems in the bud by backing up your old drive and placing a new drive in your machine, you won’t need to worry about a failing drive for a long time to come. If you let the problems snowball however, you’ll find yourself trying to recover hard drive data against the odds – because it may well be damaged beyond repair, and getting your data off could be impossible.
Are The Odds In Your Favor?
One in 12 drives we evaluate can be recovered with a free, simple fix. Get a free evaluation here.