A few days ago we had a major problem at work. One of the secretaries pressed the wrong button or something, and she accidentally deleted several very important files. Naturally her boss was more than a little upset and the secretary was soon reduced to tears. Fortunately there was someone in the office who knew a little about computers and hard drives and he advised us to get hold of some file recovery professionals. We did so, and within 24 hours she had all of her data back and a smile on her face. Apparently a hard drive can fail for any number of different reasons. It can happen when there is a large fluctuation in voltage, such as you may get in a thunderstorm or when you’re the victim of an Eskom “outage”. It could be a virus or even just a physical problem with an old hard drive, like the read head failing, or the motor giving up. Anyway, there are file recovery professionals there to assist.

If you happen to be based in Johannesburg, Durban or Cape Town, the best people to call – certainly the company I would recommend – is Intratec. They have been around since their inception in 2000, when the company was founded by a couple of brothers in Cape Town. They now have three branches open and are looking further afield. Intratec have all of the latest equipment and software to assist them in file recovery. These professionals even have a “clean room” – that’s a room that is kept under positive air pressure to prevent minute particles of dust that could affect normal data recovery. Professionals will tell you that hard drives have to be kept meticulously clean.