Many times you get the call to recover someone’s hard drive and way too many times — that person has NEVER made any kind of backup! Sometimes you get lucky and the hard drive is only suffering from some user error and you can get the files right back. Other times it is an accidental deletion.
When it is a hard drive failure or corruption, your options for recovery go to nearly nil or they get extremely expensive. (The kind where you ship the hard drive off and pay thousands!) A corrupt drive can be a more complex situation to recover from, as it may only partially effect your files. Some files and folders will display correctly while others may not show up at all. If you do not known the reason for the corruption, make sure you backup any remaining data of value onto another storage media such as another external hard drive, a USB memory stick or even to CD or DVD. Do not attempt to try to recover the data with another program as the stability of the problem drive cannot be assured. In other words, you may make matters worse.
Getta Geek can assist you with making a determination on the severity of your hard drive issue and can usually recover most files if acted on quickly enough. The more you use a corrupted hard drive, the more damage you will cause and the more likely your files will be lost.
You can use online backup services to have your files automatically backed up without having to remember to perform backups. Online sites like Mozy or Carbonite offer reasonable rates (or free) depending on the amount of data you have to backup.
http://mozy.com/home
http://www.carbonite.com/
So don’t just sit there — if you haven’t backed your files in a while, go get some usb sticks and make some backups of your precious music, pictures and documents before it’s too late!
