In one horrifying moment, you find yourself faced with one of the most terrifying things of our time: a hard drive failure. All of your stored photos, sensitive files, videos and downloaded tunes are seemingly gone in a moment; it is a heart-stopping thing. As all hard drives are mortal, they will all face this frightening possibility. If you don’t back up your information, what options do you have? Is it lost forever or is it possible to recover the precious data on your drive? Here are a few things to consider before you destroy the hard drive.
It Is Possible, Most of the Time.
For most of the common failures a hard drive experiences, it is possible to recover the data that is stored therein. There are two essential kinds of hard drive failures: logical and mechanical.
Logical: This means something has gone wrong with the coding. There has been some type of glitch in the programming, which has caused the drive to suddenly cease to function. Plenty of programs exist to recover the data as long as you have access to another computer from which to operate the program.
Mechanical: This means one, or multiple, of the tiny mechanisms that operate the hard drive has broken or otherwise ceased to function. For this, you will need a specialist who has access to the latest in state-of-the-art equipment and clean room facilities because they will need to get into the inner workings of the device to determine and repair the problem.
In addition, whether you can recover data from the hard drive depends on how much damage it has taken. If it has been through a bit of a roughing up from an unexpected drop and some water damage, you should be fine. If you took it to the local shooting range for target practice, your data is likely gone forever.
As you can see, recovering your data is more than likely possible if you entrust the task with a qualified professional in the right circumstances. Don’t destroy the hard drive before you get what you need.
Once you have recovered your data, you will need to have the hard drive destroyed. If you have questions, contact EPE Components today.