There are many specialist data recovery companies in operation today due to the wide & complex nature of data recovery. Data recovery involves a vast range of media types and a wide variety of circumstances. Because data recovery is such a complex and delicate operation, often where you only have one chance at recovering your critical data, we should start these data recovery tips with the most important one… If you are in any uncertainty what so ever, seek the service of a data recovery specialist who will be able to recover your data in the safest possible way.

Another very important tip and strangely one that may seem to not actually be concerning data recovery, is backing up your data. Backing up your data is extremely important and hugely related to data recovery because ‘restoring’ is often used in recovering data. Even though data backup is so important there is an alarming number of individuals who do not have a solid backup plan in place; either because they are unaware of the need or feel it is to expensive to implement. Data backup can be expensive but unless you are a multinational conglomerate you probably only need a relatively small & inexpensive solution. What ever backup solution you choose you must follow two rules to make it worth while: Backup three times on three different sets of media and do so regularly.

Try to make a complete copy of as much of the data as you can. This may not be feasible if you are experiencing hardware failure. However if you are working with file corruption you should usually be able to create a duplicate of the file(s) which are as good/bad as the original.

You must implement some kind of virus protection as well as a firewall if you PCs are connected to the internet. It has been estimated that a computer as soon as it is connected to the internet for the first time, when using broadband in particular, will receive its first attack within just 20 minutes.

If you are running an in-place data recovery, make sure you utilize data recovery applications that are able to run from external media types or drives to the problematic drive itself. This includes media types such as floppy discs or CD-ROMs. You must absolutely never install software or copy data onto the disk which you are trying to recovery data from. Doing so can make the data recovery process harder and even impossible.

The process of recovering the data from a hard drive can often be made much easier by removing the physical hard drive and placing it in another computer which is able to read the file-system used on the hard drive and preferably which is also has the same operating system installed. When you have the hard drive accessible via another computer system you can copy data through and intact file system without greatly affecting the problem hard drive.

Before you start the data recovery process you need to analyze the costs and benefits of recovering your data yourself or in-house. You must know accurately the time and resources required to complete the data recovery process because you may find that it is more cost-effective to either create the data from scratch or use the services of a data recovery specialist.