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What to do when things go wrong: hard drive recovery

Posted on 23 Mar 2011 at 16:35

When disaster strikes, and it will, there are some costly mistakes to avoid and one very easy way to ensure you recover your data as safely as possible. Davey Winder explains more

Nothing lasts forever, and that includes your hard disk. While it’s nice to think that every hard disk death is pre-empted by gradually worsening mechanical moans and groans, giving you time to move your data to a new drive before the inevitable end, the truth is that hard disks can fail suddenly and for all sorts of reasons: fire and flood, power surges, viruses and even human error (accidental reformatting is more common than you might imagine).

This is why it's so vital to regularly back up your data, be that to tape, DAS, NAS or the cloud. But what if your small business has done the unthinkable and not backed up that critical data and the hard disk fails? What can you do then to prevent the potentially devastating impact upon your business?

What not to do

The harsh truth is that no business can afford to lose critical data, and will need to recover that data quickly to ensure the business doesn’t suffer unduly. When a hard disk fails the temptation is to try everything you can to recover your data immediately, but this isn’t the time for knee-jerk reactions.

When a hard disk fails the temptation is to try everything you can to recover your data immediately, but this isn’t the time for knee-jerk reactions

Clearly understanding what NOT to do in the event of such a disaster scenario is just as important as knowing what to do if you want to actually see your data again. You simply don’t know the extent of the damage to both your drive and your data.

In fact, a little knowledge can go a long way to ensuring you prevent even the best forensic experts from rescuing data from the broken drive, and that includes Googling for advice or downloading “data rescue” software.

Much of the online advice you’ll find will come from a company trying to sell you its recovery software, and employing downloaded recovery software isn’t a good idea in the business realm. Sure, there is a chance it could work, but there's just as great a chance that by accessing files on that drive will result in making them impossible to recover successfully.

The most important thing you shouldn’t do after a failure is use the disk at all. Don't keep trying to reboot it, and if it does mount don't try and copy the data off of it. So what should you do?

What you should do

In stark contrast to the “what not to do” section, this one is perhaps surprisingly brief and can be summed up in two simple steps.

1. Turn off the computer/server and swap the disk out immediately.

2. Call in the data recovery experts who can use forensic techniques to safely and securely recover as much of your data as possible.

Dell ProSupport Hard Drive Recovery

For Dell small business customers with ProSupport Hard Drive Data Recovery, calling in the cavalry is as simple as phoning technical support.

Dell will arrange for your hard disk to be delivered safely to one of a number of regionally diverse Dell labs where it can be examined by experts in a dust-free “clean room environment”, which protects the delicate drive platters (and consequently your data which is stored upon them) from further damage whilst being dismounted and rebuilt during the retrieval process.