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What You Need to Know About Data Recovery

Data recovery is one of the biggest worries most PC users face. Most people will encounter a situation at some point where they find themselves no longer able to access data they need. Fortunately in many situations there are ways to access your data, and at Phone Medics Plus we can help you get your data back.


Unfortunately, data recovery can be a little tricky, and the amount of data you can get back depends on what is preventing you from accessing your data. For example, if your computer isn’t booting, there could be a problem with the motherboard, the RAM, a corrupted file that Windows needs in order to boot, or some other issue. In that sort of situation, your data is intact on your hard drive and all we need to do is access it. That can be done by repairing the issue that’s keeping the computer from booting, or it can be done by removing the drive and plugging it into another computer.

Sometimes, however, the issue is that the files you want to access have been deleted. Fortunately, all hope is not lost. With the right software tools, it is possible to recover deleted data from your hard drive. The reason for that is pretty simple: on a traditional hard disk drive (HDD), when you delete a file, Windows doesn’t actually remove the file from your drive. All it actually does is remove the pointers that tell the system where the file is located, and marks the file’s sectors as available space. Imagine a library that "removed" books by deleting them from its catalog, but left the physical books on the shelf until they needed the space. It's a lot like that. As long as the sectors that your files occupied haven’t been overwritten, the data is still there, ready to be recovered by special software that examines the sectors of your drive directly. The same is true if you want to recover data from a formatted drive. When you format a drive, all Windows actually does is delete the data telling it where the files on the drive were located, leaving the data intact.

Now, there are a couple of caveats when it comes to recovering deleted files. First, because the file’s sectors have been marked as available, it’s possible that some or all of them have been overwritten, so the longer it’s been since the file was deleted or the drive was formatted, the greater the likelihood that some or all of the data you want to recover has been overwritten. Second, if the data is lost because you formatted your drive and reinstalled Windows, and you selected the “Remove files and clean the drive” option during the reset process, then it won’t be possible to recover your data, because it was overwritten during the formatting process.

The third caveat involves SSD drives. SSDs (Solid State Drives) are built completely differently than traditional hard drives (HDDs, Hard Disk Drives). Unfortunately, one of the differences is that when a file is deleted from an SSD, the drive clears the sectors where the information was stored. So unlike the data on your traditional hard drive, the data deleted from an SSD is not just sitting there waiting to be overwritten, it is gone.

There are a couple more situations in which recovering data is difficult or impossible. The first is water damage. Water has a difficult time getting inside the casing of a hard drive, but when it does, it’s a serious problem. Data recovery from a water damaged hard drive is extremely difficult. The same goes for recovering data from a damaged drive. A hard drive that’s been dropped, for example, often suffers mechanical damage that prevents the drive from working. In those kinds of situations, your only real option is employing a data recovery service that can disassemble your drive in a cleanroom environment and extract the data.

If you need help to recover data from your hard drive, Phone Medics Plus is here for you. Our experienced technicians can recover data from non-booting computers and recover your deleted files. And if you have a drive that’s suffered water damage or a mechanical failure and you need to send it to a data recovery service, we can help you remove the drive from your computer and get it ready to ship. You can contact us by phone or email, book an appointment online, or bring your computer to our facility at 91 E. Merritt Island Causeway in Merritt Island.
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Location: 91 E Merritt Island Causeway, Merritt Island, FL 32952, USA

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