• Never physically open up your drive. Exposure to unfiltered air, and the contaminants that it carries, can permanently ruin the platters.
• Treat your drive with care. Do not drop it or toss it around after you have removed it from your computer, as it is very delicate.
• Be especially careful with laptop drives. Although these drives are designed to be jostled and moved around, they are thinner and smaller than desktop drives. If their cases are bent or broken, it may become impossible to remount the drive.
• Do not format a disk unless you are absolutely sure that the drive works and contains no data that you want or need. Formatting will completely wipe the drive of all its contents.
• If you back up data to CDs or DVDs during the recovery process, check that the burning process was successful or you may lose the files forever when you reformat your drive.

In order to make it easier for data to be recovered in the event of a loss it is best to backup and store documents or data in Open Format. Whenever possible, avoid using formatted text such as a word .doc: using plain text (either ascii or .txt format) guarantees complete access for everyone, regardless of their software, their operating system or the computer they are using. In your emails, if what is important to you is the content and not the formatting, send the text directly in the body of your message instead of sending it as an attachment.

HTML format is the standard language for the web, and it was defined by a standardising international organisation. HTML is a flexible universal format, rich and compact. Native HTML (with no javascript) can carry no virus and can be read on any platform. Note: The HTML code produced by Word is semi-proprietary, and it is liable to include information that cannot be displayed on all platforms.