Data Recovery
How safe is your data?
What would you do if your hard drive stopped working, or your laptop was stolen?
We've been contacted recently by an increasing number of people requiring data to be recovered from
- Corrupt hard drives (internal and, more often, external)
- Damaged CDs and DVDs
- USB Flash Drives, SD cards etc
- accidental deletion
and the good news is that very often the files or other data can be retrieved relatively quickly and easily using a range of specialist tools.
Generally speaking deleted files can be recovered from most media types until it is written over by another file – so the quicker recovery is done the better.
As far as CDs and Hard Drives are concerned, it is usually possible to recover most files even if the media is not properly recognised, though it is usually necessary to remove the hard drive in order to run our diagnostic and recovery tools.
USB flash drives can be more problematic, as sometimes the controller chip can fail, rendering the data inaccessible. There are other specialist companies who claim to be able to recover data in these circumstances, but we are not able to recommend any currently. If the chips are still functional, but a software error is preventing access to files, then we can usually recover data in the same way as for other media types.
Recovered data can be provided on a USB drive, CD/DVD or via online storage.
Password Retrieval
We are also able to retrieve various passwords using specialist tools, but in the interests of privacy and security we will usually require additional proofs of ownership before doing so.
Where we are satisfied that it is appropriate to do so we can retrieve passwords from and unlock
- BIOS system password
- Windows/User password
- Office document passwords
- PDF save/print passwords
- …and others
Data Backup
We strongly recommend that you have at least one backup copy of all your files and data. Two copies if preferable, with one of them being located off-site or “in the cloud”.
The reality is that drives do fail, files do become corrupted, and devices do get stolen. Prevention is always better than cure, and reloading data from a backup is always easier (and cheaper) than recovery.
