Working with big quantities of information? You know the desperate moment when you realize that you need something that you deleted a long time ago. This is the subject of this post : Recycle bin data recovery. First lets start with some general data recovery tips, valid for all type of data devices, PC’s, Mac’s, phones.
Have a data recovery program ready for use. When your hard drive goes bad and you lose valuable files and documents, it’s time to turn on your favorite data recovery software solution and recover everything back from the bad hard drive. We highly recommended Disk Drill for Windows and Mac OS X. The main advantages of Disk Drill are its ease of use, support for more than 200 file formats and all common storage devices, including iOS and Android smartphone and tablets.
If this works, use the working Mac to make copies of the files you need most (photos, documents, etc.). Once you’ve done that, you’re free to wipe or repair the disk, hopefully getting that original laptop working again. To do this, restart the computer and hold down CMD+R until you see the Apple logo or a spinning globe. From MacOS Utilities, select Disk Utility. Pick the topmost drive on the left, and select First Aid or Repair. If it works, this will solve lots of issues, including a wonky drive.
On being struck with a logical failure, the hard drive won’t make any noises, but it won’t boot up or let you access the data. And here’s the good part. When a hard drive fails, or you accidentally format it or delete data from it, the data doesn’t disappear. It stays on the drive until something else is overwritten on it. Usually, with a properly working hard drive, all data has its own dedicated storage space. Deleted data or formatted storage or in this case, storage on the failed hard drive is marked as “fit for overwriting”.
Having covered the ‘deleted data’ section of data recovery is all good and well, but what happens if your drive is not even being detected by your machine? Or your machine can see the drive, but just hangs when you try to access it? What about if the drive is completely dead and won’t even spin up? Let’s briefly cover the main components of a drive, see which components can fail, and what symptoms each failure might exhibit. PCB: This is the (often green) circuit board attached to the bottom of your drive. It houses the main controller (the equivalent of your computer’s CPU) along with many other electronic controllers. This is the interface that turns your 0s and 1s from the platter into usable data that your computer can understand.
Modern solid state drives (SSDs) in newer portable computers are much more difficult to access. These laptops are built very thin, and reaching the casing screws is sometimes impossible. Even if the case can be opened, many of these drives are inaccessible and sometimes even soldered directly onto the other components, so removal is virtually impossible. If someone has an SSD laptop that’s inoperable and contains important data, then the only viable option is to send the machine to a specialised shop. This company will open the device in a clean room and have the right sockets to match to the laptop’s proprietary connectors. While such recovery is usually successful, it could potentially cost thousands and will require a considerable amount of time.
Sometimes, when we go to look for information in some of our hard drives and we do not find it, we believe that we erase it and we cannot recover it. In most cases, if you delete information from a device, it is not possible to recover it without the proper tools. The good thing is that we know that tool and we can help you, so we show you how to recover deleted files which were deleted long time ago – even you deleted them 2 or 4 years ago. Read more details at How to recover deleted files which were deleted long time ago?.