The main events that can cause you to lose your hard drive data is file deletion, formatting the drive and physical damage. The approaches to savaging your data have varying degrees of success depending on how quickly you attempt to recovery the data.

Simple Deletion

By deleting a file, you are merely flagging this documents directory location as pointing at the recycle bin. You can restore your files by opening the recycle bin, right clicking the files and choosing ‘restore’ from the context menu. Deleted files on external hard drives will be stored in the Recycle Bin located on the external drive itself (not on your internal hard drives recycle bin).

Full Deletion And Formatting

If the recycle bin has been emptied or files were deleted using ‘shift-delete’ then they have bypassed the recycle bin. The data clusters for these files still remain on the hard disk but the files directory location has been cleared (so it doesn’t appear when viewing the file structure).

To recover hard drive data in this scenario requires the use of data recovery software. There are many free options to choose from (for example, CGSecurity‘s PhotoRec tool) and also many commercial tools (the pricier ones are generally more capable of finding a greater number of files). Each application reads the file allocation table to identify data and scans the drive for data clusters that can be formed into documents.

Physical Damage

In the unfortunate event of physical damage to the hard drive (flooding/fire damage/physically broken) then your sole option is to resort to using the services of data recovery experts. This process of mechanical/physical recovery involves salvaging the hard drive and using mechanical reading devices to read data from the disk and recovery costs are dependent on the level of PC repairs and specialist equipment that needs to be used.