Your data is super important – it’s always painful to lose, regardless of the reasons. We are here to ensure its recoverability and provide help and advice. Unfortunately, recovering lost data is not an exact science, and as we usually say, [almost] every recovery case is unique, that’s why we’ve compiled a great list of simple hints that may increase your chances of getting your data back successfully.
Data recovery centers and solo specialists are known to discourage users from attempting do-it-yourself data recovery with the help of software, like Disk Drill. Clearly, their motivation is largely fueled by their own price tags (a professional data recovery may easily cost you US$500-$5000 per case or more), while Disk Drill lifetime license costs only US$79, and depending on your circumstances, is perfectly safe to download and run yourself.
Obviously, there are situations when you want an expert to be involved. However, being in this business for 12+ years, seeing hundreds of thousands of real-life data loss cases, speaking to tens of thousands of users every month, we are more than confident that ~80% of accidental file loss can be treated with the right software tools without any external help.
It’s also true, there are pretty common data loss situations when data, unfortunately, is really gone for good, and even a pricey white-glove data recovery lab won’t be able to restore it, not mentioning numerous scams on the internet from impostors. However, if you are following basic data recovery rules, there’s hardly any possibility that data recovery software can cause additional damage.
Moreover, Disk Drill won’t cost you anything to verify your data recoverability, it lets you preview and even recover up to 500 MB of your data for free before you consider whether you are interested in upgrading to its premium version for unlimited recovery, or seeking someone else’s advice.
Whichever the cause of your data loss, your specific recovery scenario will most probably fall into one of these categories.
In ANY case, it’s always recommended to immediately stop using the device where the lost data was stored!
In addition to that, here’s a great 101 on what to do once you discover that your data was lost which is relevant in any situation:
As previously mentioned, if your disk has not failed completely, there’s still a chance to salvage your data. Depending on its condition, which we’ve already discussed in this article, if your assessment is light mechanical damage, we don’t recommend direct scan and recovery of such a storage device. Instead, to minimize potential impact, after following our basic recommendations, you should create a byte-to-byte backup of the entire drive to a healthy storage device. Once completed, such a backup will contain all the sectors from the original media, even the ones that are marked as empty but may still contain valuable data to be recovered. As a result, data recovery software will be scanning and analyzing a physically healthy device that contains the same set of potentially recoverable data.
The default option for a byte-to-byte backup (or binary copy) of a drive in Disk Drill is DMG format, which stands for Apple or Mac OS X disk image. It’s a pretty common file format that can also be opened and is widely supported by multiple tools on Windows.
Here we go.
Let’s assume, we are using a removable USB drive named “Wilk USB DISK 3.0” as our target drive, and will create the DMG image and perform a recovery from that image. The process can also be done using your main hard drive if you have an external drive attached that can hold the backup image.
Using Disk Drill and following this tutorial to recover lost files from a binary backup of a damaged hard drive that is still accessible gives you a greater chance of performing a successful recovery. This way, you only read the damaged disk once to create the disk image, and all further recovery procedures will then use that image, rather than the damaged drive, to avoid any additional hardware failures increasing your chances to safeguard the recoverable data. Disk Drill provides all the tools to accomplish this data recovery task in one package.
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