Working with big quantities of information? You know the panic moment when you realize that you need some data that you deleted a long time ago. This is the topic of this post : How to recover deleted files which were deleted long time ago? 1st lets start with some general data recovery advices, valid for all type of data devices, PC’s, Mac’s, phones.
These days, it’s perfectly viable to do just about anything in the browser. You can write documents and edit Excel spreadsheets in Google Docs and the online version of Microsoft Office, Office 365, use Dropbox or OneDrive to organize your files, edit photos in Pixlr, and much more. Because the work you do using these online apps is stored in the cloud and backed by industry-grade data backup solutions, there’s virtually zero chance of you ever losing your progress. If you can build your entire workflow around online apps, you don’t even need to bring a laptop with you when traveling. Any public computer will allow to continue right from where you left off.
The first step is to remove the hard drive from the device if possible, or otherwise stop using it. Any actions, even installing a recovery app, risks overwriting the files you need. The good news is that when you delete a file on a drive, all that data doesn’t immediately go away. The computer mostly erases the information that points the computer to that chunk of data, which will remain until it gets written over. This works differently depending on whether you have a magnetic spinning disk drive or a solid-state drive (SSD), which you’ll find on most modern computers. But either way, recovery is possible.
Everyone uses spare hard drives these days; external storage devices that serve as the perfect backup destination. However, I doubt people realize the risks and threats involved with using hard drives to store crucial data. And when I say hard drives, I don’t mean just external hard drives; this includes the internal hard drives mounted on laptops and PCs too.
Platters: Your drive contains one or more thin, circular platters. These spin around at anywhere between 5,900rpm to 7,200rpm on consumer drives and are the media that actually store your data. Made of glass or some form of alloy and coated with a magnetic layer, they can store anything up to 4TB of data. Head assembly: Data from your drives’ platters is read by means of a series of read and write heads. While in operation, these heads are not actually in contact with the surface of the platters. In fact, they ‘fly’ nanometers above the surface of the disk, reading and writing data. Typically a drive will have 2 heads per platter, so a large capacity drive with 3 platters will be paired up with 6 heads, one for each side of each platter. If these heads fail physically or the drive is dropped or knocked over, the drive can experience a ‘head crash’ where the heads no longer fly over the platters, but instead make contact with the surface and destroy your data at a few thousand revolutions per minute.
Older laptops that were constructed with traditional hard drives were fairly simple to pop open and fix. You could unscrew a few screws holding the case together, and then plug into the drive via a universal SATA port to retrieve the data. Opening the actual drive itself is not without risk, or advisable, as dust could and will enter the drive, causing contamination and potentially additional damage during the process. For example, older drives would be subject to something called stiction, and sometimes became ‘stuck’, whereby the head and actuator were locked or stuck and the motor failed to spin, causing the hard drive platters to spin improperly. One trick that had some reported success involved placing a hard drive in the freezer, which would cause the metal to contract and become unstuck, at least long enough to offload the data.
If you have a storage device that you have not used for a while and you realize that you deleted information a long time ago, it is possible to recover it. There are different tools when recovering files, and one of them are data recovery software, programs specialized in the recovery of any type of file and that work under any operating system. Read extra details on Deleted file recovery.
