Not only is it a nuisance when your hard drive decides to crash, but it can also have detrimental results. Information is of high importance in today’s world, and not being able to access yours can lead to serious consequences, even financially. So what do you do if this had to happen to you? The most important advice is to not do anything yourself if you want to have a chance to retrieve some of the information. The best is to go to an expert on hard drive data recovery.

A hard drive is a very sensitive piece of equipment, and if the crash was caused by physical damage, the chances are that it might have to be opened. This cannot be just be done by anybody, anywhere. Even dust that settles on the surface can lead to the remaining information to be lost. Intratec Data Recovery has the necessary state of the art facilities to do successful hard drive data recovery. Contact us to help you save your valuable data.

Losing data can lead to the utmost inconvenience, and can even be detrimental to businesses, as it may lead to a loss in revenue. Protecting your electronically saved data is thus very important. If it does happen that your computer crashes or sustains significant damage, you might have to opt for professional hard drive recovery to save what information you can. It is very important not to attempt this yourself, as you might cause irreparable damage and lose the data forever.

Intratec Data Recovery has the necessary knowledge, experience and state of the art equipment to successfully do hard drive recovery. This includes a certified clean room – the only environment in which a hard drive should be opened for recovery to prevent further damage and to ensure the best possible recovery. Intratec Data Recovery is a leading data recovery service provider and has offices in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban.

Open drive recoveries become necessary when there is a physical problem with a hard drive rather than a data problem. If, for example, the read/write heads fail, or the drive motor fails, or there is a problem on one of the printed circuit boards en

closed in the hard drive, it then becomes necessary to carry out an open drive recovery. This means that the hard drive has to be opened up, and this can only take place in a clean room. This is because the smallest speck of dust settling on a platter will cause data to be lost through corruption. A clean room is pressurized through fine filters so that when someone enters through an air lock, air will only flow out and not in.

• 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.

Many people are starting to use external drives, and this is for a number of reasons. In my particular case it’s because my internal hard drive is all but full, and frankly I cannot afford a new computer just yet. I found out that you can now get external drives that just plug into a USB slot.

You can pick up a 160gB drive for a little over R900 and a 250gB for about R1200, and that’s much cheaper than buying a new computer. But what happens if the drive crashes for some reason?

External drives can be subject to data loss just like any other hard drive. It’s just that much easier to get an external hard drive to the data recovery experts if there is ever a problem.

Earlier this month I had the misfortune of having one of my hard drives pack up on me. Actually it didn’t fail, but I had negligently allowed it to get full up. I first noticed a problem when my files started appearing in reverse alphabetical order in Explorer. Having been working with computers for the last twenty or thirty years I was able to remedy the situation myself, but it involved deleting a lot of programs that I didn’t need (oh how we accumulate useless programs!), repairing my operating system and then finding my address book and Outlook Express folders, all of which had gone missing.

Why am I telling this story? Just to illustrate how, even someone who has been working with computers for so long can become complacent. Check your hard drives regularly and if necessary get rid of some of the accumulated and never-used programs that are there.

The Internet or the World Wide Web as it’s sometimes called is nothing less than a vast collection of data that is stored in millions of hard drives all around the world. Today’s “Information Age” runs on data, so the storage of that data is very important, not necessarily just to the owner of that data source, but potentially to many people around the world. Imagine what would happen if Google crashed – well, it has in the past and it may well do so again, with disastrous results. People rely upon their data storage, but sometimes a hard drive fails, and then it’s time to call in recovery professionals. Hard drives can fail for all sorts of reasons. It could be a mechanical cause such as a head failure, it could be because of a thunderstorm, or it could be a malicious attack by a virus or other malware. Whatever the reason, there are recovery professionals out there to assist.

Not so long ago there was no such thing as hard drive recovery professionals, but the advance of Information Technology has necessitated that such a profession should have evolved. Today most major urban centres have at least one good hard drive recovery professional service.

One such organization is Intratec, who have bases in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg. If and when you experience a hard drive failure, you could do far worse than contact this company. We had such a failure just a few weeks ago, and within 24 hours, they had us up and running again as though nothing had happened. It’s good to be able to call upon a company you can rely on.