What Are The Best Practices for Data Recovery?

Data protection is an important task to maintain business continuity. For this “Backups” is one of the crucial aspects that is practiced by most organizations and a few individuals. However, people often ignore the importance of data backups and thus, when something goes wrong with the system or hard disk, it usually ends up with data loss due to lack of proper backup. That’s where data recovery comes into play.

Data recovery is a sophisticated task that should be executed carefully with the help of reliable tools. In a data loss situation, people generally panic and try to fix the drive by themselves. This mostly ends up making the situation worse.

Therefore, if you ever face a data loss situation, here are some of the best practices (& precautions) that you should implement for a successful recovery process.

1.  Create/Setup Backups

Backups are helpful in a data loss situation. It facilitates effortless recovery and help save time and resources needed to recover data otherwise. Therefore, creating scheduled backups is one of the best practice that you can implement at your personal level or in your organization.

2. Disconnect Immediately – Stop Using the System/Drive

This is the first and foremost step which is also the most important. If you ever face a data loss situation, stop using the system or the affected drive immediately. This is important in order to avoid overwriting of data and further damage to the hard drive —both logically and physically.

This will also minimize chances of data corruption and maximize the probability of a successful data recovery. Therefore, shutdown the system, do not restart as booting involves reading and writing the hard disk/SSD that could overwrite lost data.

3. Do Not Format the Drive

When external drives get corrupt, you usually get prompt on your Windows screen to format it when it’s not recognized due to corruption. Never click the ‘Format’ button to avoid data loss. In fact, never format any drive whether the popup is shown or not.

Formatting does repair most of the corrupt drives but with a hefty cost of data loss. So be careful when you decide to format the drive. It’s better to use a professional data recovery software like Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Windows in such a situation.

4. Don’t run Disk Repair (CHKDSK)

CHKDSK is usually run to detect and fix file system or disk corruption. It works by fixing the soft bad sectors and this is where the problem lies. While fixing the bad sectors and file system, it might overwrite affected memory block on the drive that can lead to data corruption and eventually data loss.

Therefore, be cautious before running CHKDSK utility. CHKDSK scans should be run on a normal working drive to repair bad sectors and file system errors that might lead to drive corruption at a later stage. Use S.M.A.R.T. – the inbuilt disk monitoring system to keep an eye on disk health and run CHKDSK to fix them before the drive fails or data gets corrupt.

5. Use a Separate Drive to save Recovered Data

Always use a separate hard drive or storage media to save the recovered data. Reliable data recovery software such as Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Windows doesn’t let you save recovered data on the same media. It automatically detects and differentiates between the source of the recovered data and the destination where data will be saved. Thus, preventing overwriting of data and facilitating successful and secure data recovery.

Moreover, Stellar Data Recovery Professional also helps you recover data from a formatted, inaccessible and corrupt hard drives & deleted partitions.

Conclusion

Hard drives can fail at any point of time without prior warnings and data or hard drive can get corrupt due to malware/virus attacks. There are several other similar factors that eventually leads to a data loss situation.

To safeguard yourself from such data disasters, inculcate a habit of creating scheduled backups and always handle the drive carefully (whether it’s damaged physically or logically) to prevent a permanent data loss situation.

Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Windows is one of the most reliable data recovery tools that is developed by Stellar Data Recovery which is trusted by more than 2 million users worldwide. The tool helps you recover data from inaccessible, formatted and corrupt hard drives or deleted partitions with just a few clicks.

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About The Author

Satyeshu Kumar

Satyeshu is a Windows blogger and data recovery expert. He is having good technical knowledge and experience in Windows data recovery. He writes about latest technical tips, Windows issues and tutorials.