Data Recovery
It happens one day out of the blue. You sit down to use your computer and turn it on, but instead of being greeted by a warm welcome page, you find yourself staring at a blank screen. Your heart races as you press several unfamiliar keyboard combinations, even depressing the power button a few times hoping to revive your (normally) high tech appliance from the dark abyss it has found itself in, and along with it your precious data. You get angry at yourself for not heeding a friend or family member’s advice about making backup copies of those important work documents or the library of photos you have kept since your child was born. All is NOT lost with Data Recovery services provided by Computer Zone.
What do I do now?
If you think you might have a problem with your hard drive, or have accidentally deleted important files, THE FIRST THING YOU SHOULD DO IS STOP USING IT. Continually using a storage media device (like the hard drive in your computer or a memory card) after it presents symptoms of a failure or after an accidental deletion is the biggest reason some people lose their data.
In the event you have accidentally deleted something or lots of things that you consider very important or irreplaceable, stop using that device as soon as you realize you have a problem. Just because something has been deleted doesn’t mean its gone (at least in computer terms). It just means you can’t find it anymore. If you continue using it, you may accidentally overwrite your deleted data making it way more difficult to resurrect.
If you are concerned that your storage media may have some type of failure, continuing to try to power it up, plug it in or use it in anyway severely decreases your chances of retrieving important data exponentially. Most people don’t even realize they have a problem until it is too late, but it is important to heed this advice as it does increase your chances of getting your data back.
In either case, your first phone call should be to Computer Zone. Our techs use state of the art methods and software to methodically identify the problem and attempt to retrieve your data. Unfortunately, it is impossible to be successful 100% of the time as some media can become physically damaged, but our successes greatly outnumber our unfruitful attempts.
Word of the day – REDUNDANT BACKUPS
The best thing you can do to prevent losing your data is to have redundant backups. This means having many copies of your important files. In the age of The Cloud based backup subscriptions and ever falling prices of external storage media, you can have piece of mind that if your primary storage device fails, all is not lost. What do we recommend? All of them. Your important files are safest when you have more than 2 (Thats Right: MORE THAN TWO) different backup solutions that are in different physical locations. Online services like Dropbox or Carbonite safely and securely store your data across multiple data servers in different locations and gets the job done, but usually come with an albeit reasonable monthly price tag. For those that have privacy concerns or simply cannot afford another monthly payment, flash drives and external hard drives usually come with software you can install that makes scheduled backups quick and painless. The very best protection is the amount you can justifiably afford that allows you to store your data across a combination of solutions and physical locations. As a bonus, some Cloud based solutions offer free trials or even limited data amounts free of charge like Google’s Drive where you automatically get 5GB of space with every Google account you create (which is also free).