Backup – Lifeline For Your Computer Data
Backup of hard disks not only give protect against lost data as a result by hardware breakdown, power interruptions, weather catastrophes, or some other disaster. No, the backups also give extra security against small mishaps. We do backup to external disks and to tape backup devices in order to protect the organization from loss of its data that halt the business it if it happens. But sometimes, the protections of backups are not for businesses but for home users. These are home users who have not done regular backups and collected tons of personal pictures the loss of which would be irrecoverable.
Imagine you are a PC expert with a mobile PC support company and you get a call from one of these home users where it says that Windows has disk errors and will refuse to start up. And as in most cases there will be no backup but you ask anyways. Suppose for a moment! The user, since he was able to display DOS blinking prompt, tried a system utility called FDISK. He figured out that the name meant “Fix disk” and he delete it from one of the disk partitions. This is a case when a utility to recover lost data partitions is useful to have in the emergency kit.
Disk partitions should be worked on to those who are experts on them and how unforgiving it can be if the utilities for them are used wrong. The best thing is to have a partition ghosting utility such as Norton Ghost that will make a partition backup of the vital setups and system software and then a another software such as Novastor Backup to do incremental and full backups of user files. But sometimes, a simple partition recovery tool can put a disk partition to work after restoration with little data loss.
Just because a disk will not boot the computer does not necessarily mean the boot disk drive is all corrupt. In some cases only a limited area is bad but that area is keeping the operating system from starting up because that too much errors get reported. If a partition is removed by accident, then the data in that may still be there. Only the partition table has to be recreated.
EASEUS Partition Manager is one product that can recover deleted partitions. Another product is File Scavenger. File Scavenger even advertises that it can restore from formatting of a partition. Still there exists other software tools for this, but the goal here is to recreate condition from which you can move the information files to another partition or backup and then create a newly created boot partition. After trying using a partition recovery software utility, the hope is that Windows can be booted up. In the event that it doesn’t work as planned, you want to be able to get a DOS prompt to show up so that you are able to see the files that then are need to be removed to another location.
If you have the fortune to be able to see the DOS prompt command and see the lost data files that is located in the user’s “My Documents” folder, then it should be possible to connect to an external backup drive (the easiest way is to use a USB external hard drive) and to move the data files off to this drive. Then, the hard drive can be formatted, Windows installed, and the files recovered. It’s a cumbersome restoration but your client will be very happy to get the family pictures back.
Tagged: Data Backup, data devices, Data Recovery, data storage, partition
Got something to say? Click here to reply
