Data Recovery UK

It is very easy to forget how long we can all spend working on an important university or business document or PowerPoint presentation, if you were to add it all up it could amount to days and on occasions weeks but what do you do when you suddenly find the file has simply vanished from your computer.

The first thing to do is to do a search of your folders to make sure you have not saved it in the incorrect folder and if this does not fine the elusive file you can also try having a look in the recycle bin to make sure you have not accidently deleted it. If the file can still not be found then this may be indicative that you are suffering from a degraded drive.

It would be nice to think that your hard drive will remain reliable for ever until the day you renew your computer but like most things mechanical drive failures do occur it would seem far more often than you would expect especially given the manufacturers mean time between failure specifications that come with a new hard drive or can be found on the manufacturers website.

Unfortunately life isn’t always that straight forward!

So the big question is when is the best time to renew my hard drive so it does not suffer from any failures?

This is one of those wide open questions that will have experts arguing until the cows come home because there are a wide variety of factors that come into play.

The first major aspect is of course the use that a computer is put through during its lifespan. Many home users only use their Pc very occasionally and store relatively small numbers of files or photos. In this scenario it would be nice to expect a drive to last over 5 years (don’t assume this though).

The same expectation could be applied to the many mid range computer users which includes office Pc’s laptops and home desktop systems, where users have a small number of programs in use and small amounts of data or if data is stored on a central server.

But for power users it is an entirely different story. Extreme gamers and users of high end commercial applications will be driving their systems very hard indeed and the amount of data that is shifted into swap files or written back to the disk is huge so its only reasonable to expect disk life to be shorter and the chances of drive failure or disk degradation to be far higher.

To combat the increased risk of failure and to protect essential data well informed IT departments will make sure that the machines are renewed far more often than office PC’s in this scenario. Another consideration for this is also business productivity for example shorter design time or time to market.

For business critical applications extended use sees a ramp up of hard disk degradation and also an increase in mechanical drive failures.

During challenging economic times, business computer refresh programs are often put of to protect working capital which on the face of it can be seen as a sound business decision but there can be a large bite to this policy if an essential drive or server fails with a resultant loss of business critical data.

Any business should in this day and age have effective online data backup and disaster recovery policies in place especially if postponing a business system upgrade.

Other factors affecting hard disk lifespan are the environment the computer is running in and basic system maintenance for example a poorly maintained Pc can become literally clogged with dust and get very hot. Heat is a major factor of drive failure as is hard disk fragmentation, so proper system maintenance is conducive to reliable disk performance.

Your lost file should be easily recoverable but you do need to bear in mind that any further information written to your hard drive can over write the file you are trying to save. This often happens with data recovery software so if diy recovery is your choice be warned.

Give us a call for file recovery and data recovery help.