Before you can get your data back, it’s vital that you follow these five data recovery tips:

STEP ONE: Determine the value of the data

Before you try to recover the data from your computer, you should first determine what the value of the data is to your company.

If the data is not essential to your operation and has no potential future ramifications then you could attempt to recover the data yourself.

In the real world, however, most data is crucial in day-to-day business. In fact, U.S. businesses lose on average $12 billion per year because of data loss. In an Ontrack report entitled 2001 Cost of Downtime Survey Results, 28% of respondents said that data loss would cost them between $51,000 and $250,000 per hour and 25% said it would cost them more than $251,000 per hour.

You actually need to be evaluating the cost of your data on an hourly basis. Twenty-one percent of respondents in the same Ontrack survey said that their company would be in serious risk if they lost their data for 48 hours. Twenty-four percent said that their business is at risk in less than a day of data loss.

So if you’re experiencing a hard drive crash, server problems or another crisis where data loss could be imminent, ask yourself:

How will it affect me and my company if I lose this data?
What will it cost me in dollars and down-time to re-enter this data?
Can I recreate this data if I need to?
If you conclude your data is essential, stop what you’re doing and turn off the system and follow the remaining steps.

STEP TWO: Don’t listen to anyone but a data recovery specialist

Data recovery is a highly specialized task that only experts should perform. Your corporate IT folks may think they know what they’re doing, but they don’t. Not even the system manufacturers are able tell you the right steps to take to recover your data.

Do not listen to anybody, including the manufacturers that tell you to rebuild the array, re-stripe it or reconfigure it. The difference between a RAID and a single drive is the complexity in the way it writes to these drives. If you do the wrong thing, it completely wipes it out.

STEP THREE: Gather information

When you realize your hard drive is having a problem, the first thing you must do is turn off your system. If your hard drive is clicking, for example, continued use may damage the platters and make your data unrecoverable.

Next, write down the symptoms, which could include:

Hard drive clicking
RAID drives in degraded mode
RAID controller failure
Empty containers
Volume not mounting or recognized a BIOS error
Then make a note of exactly what was happening before you discovered the problem:

Write down what error messages you received
What the screen condition is
How many drives are affected
The position of the array
The block and stripe size—both forward and backward.
It’s essential you gather as much information as possible and be honest about what is happening.

The reason this information gathering step is so important is that many employees or IT professionals fear they’ll get reprimanded or lose their jobs if it is discovered that human error caused the server crash. Therefore, they often don’t disclose all of the necessary information.

Since human error accounts for 11% of all data loss, it would save you a lot of valuable time, if the data recovery company who you are working with had all of the information up front. Even information that may be embarrassing or not seem relevant is important to share.

STEP FOUR: Never restore or rebuild the hard drive

If your server has failed, you should not attempt to manually rebuild the array. If you do, you’ll overwrite the original structure, stripping and destroying the data that you need to recover.

Many IT professionals think the solution to the problem is to backup data onto the array that is damaged. If the backup array is faulty, the IT professional just restored garbage on top of good data.

Furthermore, if the hard drive becomes inaccessible or fails, many IT professionals will run a fresh installation of the operating systems. But if they’ve reformatted the hard drive, they’ve just eliminated any data that was there.

If you have to install software, do not do it on the same drive from which you’re trying to recover data, because the more you write on a drive the more you run the risk of overwriting the sector your data’s on.

Instead of fixing the problem yourself, turn the PC, server or laptop over to a professional data recovery expert to avoid permanent consequences of data loss on your hard drive.

STEP FIVE: Call an expert

Essentially, most data is recoverable. You can even find professionals who will recovery your data in emergency situations where time is of the essence. The best thing to do is to follow the steps above and call a data recovery specialist. You’ll eliminate the guess work and be assured you’re doing all of the right things to recover your data.

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