If you need to recover data from a hard drive, you might find this article very useful. In 85% of the cases the process is successful, which is pretty high and the chance that you lost your data forever is pretty low. It is also important if you suspect a hard drive crash that you turn off your computer and let the professionals do their work. If you experiment without knowing, you might lose the data forever.

For instance, if you use cheap data recovery software or utilities from your hard drive you might increase the damage a lot, because they are meant to be used only if the hard drive works properly. To perform a data recovery you will need a lot of hardware, software and tools. You should also leave it to a professional, because every mistake can lead to permanent data loss.

The first thing that companies do is to find out the type of the failure. In the case of a logical failure they will eventually scan the hard disk and will try to repair the file system. It is possible that the hard drive is restored as it was before. If the file system can’t be repaired, each sector of the hard drive will be scanned and all the files will be copied somewhere else. This process can take up to two days if the hard drive is close to physical failure.

If your hard drive crashed because of a physical failure, it will be much harder to recover the data. In this situation you need to have the proper parts to make the hard disk work at least until you recover the data. For example, if the circuit board failed, you need to replace it with exactly the same circuit board. A lot of skill and experience is required to recover data in case of a physical failure. It can take up to ten days to recover the data and in the worst cases the data can be permanently lost.

The price for a data recovery can go up to $15.000, which is a lot of money. That’s why it always is better to backup your data, because if you don’t and you will need to recover it, you will spend a lot of money to do that. Also be careful what company you choose to do the work, because some might ask for less money than other companies at first, but after the evaluation the price will go up and it will be much more expensive than it should be.