Lost Some Critical Data? DIY or Professional Recovery – Which One to Go for?

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Home and home office users depend on the computer for a wide variety of reasons. Computers help home users in various areas ranging from their communication and research needs, to booking airline tickets, making online reservations, internet banking, weather forecasts, preparing tax-related documents, and even shopping! Therefore, it is not hard to imagine how easily these businesses and home users will be crippled if something goes wrong with their computer systems.

The very thought of losing your data can make you shudder. Therefore, when people actually do lose their data, the consequences are disastrous. Companies stand to lose millions of pounds if their data is not recovered successfully. The cost of data recovery is not only the price you pay for hiring the services of a data recovery specialist, but also the cost of lost time, business and customers.

Imagine working on a critical project from home during the office week and experiencing a computer crash. Losing the critical data might mean losing your job. Therefore, the importance of data in our lives can never be overstated. So, what do you do when your computer suddenly goes blank?

You will effectively have two options; you could either choose a data recovery software that allows you to recover the data yourself or you could hire the services of a data recovery specialist. There are a lot of DIY data recovery software available in the market. However, do they provide any value for the money? It depends on the problem and the severity of the situation.

If your hard drive has crashed or there is physical damage to the hard drive due to natural or man-made disaster, then DIY software will not be of any help. Only data recovery specialists can help you because they have the requisite knowledge and the tools to deal with this kind of a situation.

Some people do not opt for a data recovery specialist even when they know that the problem is severe. This is because people tend to think that the data recovery specialist, as any DIY software, will not be able to guarantee successful results. Therefore, why not just buy a cheaper software rather than pay an exorbitant amount for the professional service?

It is important to understand that the data recovery companies, typically, do not charge for the assessment of the data loss and they only charge for successful data recovery. In addition, the data recovery specialist will be able to tell you very clearly about the files that can be retrieved and the files that cannot be recovered.

On the contrary, there is no guarantee that a DIY software will be able to recover your files properly, and if the software messes up with the lost files, you will have to end up calling the data recovery company. Therefore, in effect, you will pay for the software as well as the professional service. In addition, the damage done by software might be more severe than the actual initial data damage. Consequently, you will end up paying more to the data recovery specialist than you would have for the initial data loss incident.

Some DIY data recovery software can actually worsen the data loss situation because they tend to overwrite on the existing data. This might result in permanent data loss. However, some of the DIY software programs are non-destructive and work as a read-only hard drive recovery utility.

The DIY software programs will be able to help you if your computer has suffered a virus attack or if you have accidentally deleted a file, partition or a volume. However, if the virus attack is very severe in nature, you have reformatted the hard drive after the crash, or if you happen to create a new file after deleting a file, then the reliability of the DIY software might be under doubt.

The reason why most DIY software programs fail or give limited results is that they have a pre-programmed path that is followed to locate the missing files. If the assumptions in this path are not correct, the result will be poor or your recovered files will be unusable. Therefore, if your data is valuable to you and loss of any file can have disastrous consequences, your safest bet would be to choose a data recovery specialist.

Article Source: http://www.myaddirectory.com

James Walsh is a freelance writer and copy editor. If you are concerned about data loss and would like more information on Data Recovery see www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk

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