• 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.

I recently became very blasé about my PC and allowed my C drive to get full, and I mean full. Apart from the fact that the computer slowed down to a trickle, when I opened up Explorer it started doing some strange things I had never seen before. Where the files had always been indexed in alphabetical order, they refused to index. At first I suspected my operating system (Windows 2000) was the culprit, and reloaded it, losing some files in the process (all my Outlook Express folders, Opera bookmarks and sessions etc.).

Fortunately I knew what to do, and have fully recovered everything, but then I know my way around computers. The moral of this is that I should never have allowed the situation to develop in the first place, and I only had myself to blame. Check your hard drive for free space at least once a week and if necessary clear up some space. If you don’t know how to do this, get someone to assist you.

If your drive is making clicking or grinding noises, even if it is still being seen by the system BIOS, you should shut the power down on your computer immediately. These noises are a good pointer that your drive has failed or is about to fail. Clicking hard drives, often referred to as the “Click of Death” are a sign that you have a serious problem, almost certainly a head crash, and you are going to need a data recovery professional to help recover your data.

Whatever you do, DO NOT switch back on a drive that is clicking, or you feel may have suffered a physical failure. Doing so will only reduce the chances of a successful recovery. Intratec are on hand 24/7 for such emergencies. Contact one of our technicians on 083 415 5154 for assistance.

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.

Data recovery has become a big thing during the last ten years, and there are emergency data recovery experts to assist you when things go wrong. Few people realize just how much today’s world relies on data that is stores electronically as opposed to the reams and reams of paper that were stored just a few years ago.

When I look at the important data files that I have stored on my own pc, for example, I am brought down to Earth when I realize that there are more than 4000 family photographs, several videos, every letter I have written for the past several years, and at least a couple of thousand articles that I’ve written. If I were to lose that lot because of a hard drive failure, I don’t know what I’d do. Fortunately, I have had the sense to make backups, so I’m unlikely to lose very much of importance.

But there are thousands of people who will read this blog and who don’t do regular backups. These are the people who will end up having to call in emergency data recovery experts when the crunch comes, and come it will. Thunderstorms happen, there are viruses and other malware out there, you will accidentally erase some important information one day soon, and when it happens you’ll spend an uneasy few hours wondering why you didn’t do backups. Intratec are emergency data recovery experts and have branches in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town. When that disaster happens to you, give them a call.

The millennium scare had one positive outcome – it made people aware of the importance of data, and one of the results was the formation of a number of emergency data recovery services around the globe. One such company to be founded in the year 2000 was Intratec Data Solutions. Francois and Chris de Jager started the company in Cape Town. Business boomed, and it wasn’t very long before they decided to open branches in Johannesburg and Durban as well.

When you think of the millions of computers in the workplace, it is pretty evident that there are going to be hard drives that fail from time to time. It’s an unfortunate fact that mechanical things wear out or suffer breakdowns of one form or another. Hard drives are particularly prone to failure because they don’t only suffer mechanical failure from time to time, but are also vulnerable to virus and other malware attacks, and, because the storage medium is magnetic, to fluctuations in power voltage as well. I lightning bolt many miles away can send a sudden surge of electricity down a power cable that eventually ends up in your computer and can do major damage. You can have a motherboard burn out, suffer corruption on your hard drive, or experience some other form of damage. When that happens it’s time to call in the emergency data recovery services.

If you have the untoward misfortune of having a hard drive failure and need to call on emergency data recovery services, call Intratec for a speedy solution. They are the number one data recovery solution in the country.

The Computer Era has completely revolutionized the workplace, and today almost all businesses, from big banks to stud dairy farmers, rely on databases. What used to be written in books not so many years ago is now stored in a database. That means that millions and millions of bits of information are stored magnetically on hard drives and tapes around the world. Because it is so easy to either corrupt or destroy this information, it is extremely important to have backups to databases.

Many of the larger organizations do this automatically by using RAID configurations, but even here there can be failure. Whatever organization you are in, if you make regular use of databases it is essential to back up your data files on a regular basis. If you do find yourself in an embarrassing situation where you have lost or corrupted data, then it is time to call in the database recovery experts.

Intratec is an organization that specialises in data recovery. They started off in Cape Town in the year 2000, and within a few years they have already opened branches in Johannesburg and Durban. They use the very latest hi tech equipment and the latest software available for data recovery. If you know your way around computers and databases it is often quite simple to recover lost data yourself, especially when you can call upon backups. However, the recovery job is sometimes much more complex, involving the use of a special clean room in which to dismantle hi tech equipment like hard drives. This is the time when you need to call in the database recovery experts.

It can be a very disheartening thing when a hard drive crashes out on you. Most of us have experienced that terrible morning when you switch on your computer and it refuses to boot up. It doesn’t matter how many times you try it, it just will not boot up. If you know a little about computers, you might try to go into CMOS to check the settings, but for most of us the only answer is to call in the hard drive recovery experts. Only a few years ago there was no such thing, but the rapid expansion of Information Technology has given rise to a number of hard drive recovery experts to fill this gap.

You can find hard drive recovery experts in most of the main centres. Intratec is the one we always use. They have offices in Cape Town, Johannesburg and a recently opened branch in Durban. These hard drive recovery experts have all the latest equipment and make use of the very latest software available. Hard drives can crash for a number of reasons. There could be a physical failure of the read/write head.

The motor that drives the drive could have failed. There could be corruption of the data itself on the hard drive – this can easily occur when there has been a dip or a spike in the voltage, such as occurs during electrical storms or power outages. Or you could have accidentally kicked the computer while the heads were in motion. If you have a boot up problem, call the experts. Call Intratec.

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.