During the weekend I usually went out early in the morning around 7 or 8 am; strolling down the street, watching the flower blooms, listening to the sound of chirping birds, and feeling the wind on my face. This is usually the time where I appreciate life the most; how wonderful it is and how amazing it can be when we know how to appreciate it. After about an hour I will walk to the nearest Indian restaurant near my house – Stellar Curry House. At Stellar, I will order one of my favorite breakfast meals – roti prata. Combined with chicken curry gravy, the taste is just marvelous and when it gets too spicy, I will drink my favorite drink, milk tea, to sooth down the pain. I’ll recover after few minutes and will then order another plate of roti prata.
Around 10 am I will go back to my house and begin to look for things to do at home. Most of the time I will do house chores like sweeping the floor, collecting all clothes to be washed and dried, or mowing the lawn. That one day, however, I felt like cleaning up my personal computer since I want to pass it over to my eldest child who has been asking for a computer every day since last week haha. So when I sat in front of the PC, I turn it on and after browsing through all types of files in every single folder I think is important to check, I decided to format the computer.
I don’t format a hard disk often in my life. That day was my 3rd time doing it and to be honest I had no idea how it was going to end. So after a very long time, the hard disk was finally formatted and ready to be used for my next agenda which is to install a new operating system. That was when suddenly I realized that I did save a super important document in one of the folders which I unfortunately didn’t check earlier. The document is a list of clients and potential clients that I have maintained for the past 5 years. There could be hundreds if not thousands of contact information listed in the document.
Now how the heck can I retrieve the document back from the formatted hard disk? I recalled last time when one of my friends had the same issue where he accidentally format his hard drive only to realize that he had failed to save his precious documents. He called a technician, an online technician and was told that once the hard drive is formatted, there’s no way he could recovery the deleted data. But that was like years ago when the technology is not there yet, I assumed. Using my android phone, I searched information on data recovery to find out if they have figured out how to recover a damaged or formatted hard disk.
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| A damaged hard disk is caused by several factors |
Turns out the technology of recovering data from hard disk is here already!
If the technology to recover important data from hard disk has been discovered, then the only question left to be asked would be how far the recovery methods can salvage data from damaged hard disk. Can the recovering technique recover data that was previously deleted from the hard disk before the hard disk is damaged? Some people would say that is plausible. Some experts on the other hand doubt that as recovery percentage would depend on type and severity of the damage.
In order to understand damage level of a hard disk, we need to know few things about hard disk. A hard disk drive is a data storage device used for storing and retrieving digital information. The technology uses a rapidly rotating discs or what they call “platters” that is coated with magnetic material. The disk retains its data even when powered off and later read in a random-access manner.
What the heck is random-access manner?
It means individual blocks of data can be stored or retrieved in any order rather than just sequentially. This is the best part about the technology; it means we can access the data we desire as and when we want to. Bad sectors are the most common form of a hard disk physical damage. They are early signs of a disk crash as it deteriorates over time. A bad sector is a sector on the physical disk which data cannot be written or read due to physical damage or inconsistencies of parity checking bits on disk. If this happens, the only way to recover data from the hard disk is to copy/clone the drive’s data to another hard disk before attempting to recover it.
Software can be used to help in analyzing copied sectors from a hard disk with physical problems onto a good one. There’s a range of software in the market both free and paid ones that help to achieve this goal. Another reason that causes a hard disk drive failure occurs when a hard disk drive malfunctions and the stored information cannot be accessed with a properly configured computer. This could be due to the disk suffers a sharp impact or environmental contamination which can lead to a head crash.
Now what is a head crash? Haha.
A head crash is a hard-disk failure that occurs when a read-write head of a hard disk drive comes in contact with its rotating discs. The repetitive contact would result in permanent and usually irreparable damage to the magnetic media on the platter surface. If you drop your laptop on the ground while it is operating, it may cause this type of hard disk failure.
A head crash usually incurs severe data loss, and data recovery attempts may cause further damage if not done by a pro in hard disk drive data recovery. Another reason why a hard disk can fail is due to faulty air filter.
Air filter? In my laptop?
The air filters in hard drives help to equalize the atmospheric pressure and moisture between the hard drive enclosure and its outside environment. If the said filter fails to capture a dust particle, the particle can land on the platter, causing a head crash if the head happens to sweep over it.
Okay enough about hard disk drive and its reasons of failure. My hard disk is not damaged; just that I have formatted it and only after doing so I realized that I have a file that contains important information. Of course I have found online a number of software from data recovery companies claiming it can be done. There are free software that can be installed on my computer to recover this file on recently formatted hard disk drive.
However, I am not confident with doing it on my own. After few hours of screening and filtering information from the internet, I finally decided that the importance of saving the file outweighs the satisfaction of retrieving the file on my own. I chose one of the phone numbers available online that says “Expert in Data Recovery” and gave it a call. The guy on the line, Robinson, told me politely the cost (which I believe is very reasonable) and later gave me his office address.
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| Data recovery is crucial in salvaging important data |
24 hours after I sent my formatted hard disk, Robinson finally gave me a call and told me the good news; he managed to retreive the file I wanted to save. In addition, he told me he had retrieved at least 85% of previous data from the hard disk before I formatted it and saved it in a separate hard disk. I went to collect my hard disk and paid for his wonderful service. So in the future if someone asks me whether it’s possible or not to retrieve data from formatted hard disk, I will be able to tell him or her that it is possible and I will definitely recommend Robinson’s name haha. I am certain now that as long that my hard disk is not damaged, I can still retrieve deleted files from it provided I know someone who is an expert in doing so or if one day I decide to learn how to retrieve data from a hdd, and do it on my own.
