Some people believe that their data will be safe as long as they look after their hard drive. This caring for their data can be in the form of buying a more reliable hard drive, ensuring the hard drive or laptop is locked away or always within site, or purchasing rugged storage such as an external hard drive that has been ‘military drop tested’. Although these might all sound like good ideas and do in fact give you a better chance of your data surviving, they are by no means fool proof. Hard drives do and will fail, and keeping an eye on your external drive or laptop doesn’t mean it’s safe from thieves or a building fire.

We recently received a hard drive for data recovery which had suffered a small and supposedly insignificant fall of a few inches. The drive was switched off at the time which is a good thing, as a powered off drive is a lot less susceptible to damage. Funnily enough, the drive was a supposed ‘rugged’ hard drive which had been ‘military drop tested’ according to the manufacturer. All of these features didn’t help, as the small caused the drive to fail. Below is an image of the hard drive in question.
This highlights the risks of trusting your data to one particular place. Even though the client had purchased a more rugged drive, it failed with a slight drop. The drive could easily have suffered from a case of stiction, head failure, or even theft. Thankfully the client was able to get all of his data back by using our data recovery services. Had the drive been stolen or completely destroyed, the ending would not have been such a positive one.

If your data is important to you, ensure you have it backed up in at least one other physical location. There are instances where  a client had a good backup system, however the backup was stored in the same location and was lost along with the original when both were stolen. An offsite backup regime is essential. If your hard drive does fail, you have a very good chance of recovery of your data by using our data recovery services. Keeping your hard drive backed up is, however, the best way of ensuring you never lose your data