subject: What to do if you lost your documents? [print this page] What to do if you lost your documents? What to do if you lost your documents?
Usually all information of a user's computer is stored on hard drives. By themselves, data on the hard disk is not protected by any of the other programs either from accidental or deliberate user commands, either from hardware failures that can lead to destructive consequences. As a result, valuable information can be lost due to random crashes of programs, actions of viruses, user errors, or deliberate destruction of data by an attacker. How expensive is the lost data - each defines for himself. Often this can exceed the cost of the entire computer or years of hard work.
What if the hard drive somehow lost valuable files or its logical drives are all formatted or even deleted? Many people believe that the data is lost forever. But it is not. We will consider the most typical cases...
How does deleting a file in DOS or Windows standard tools of the OS (omitting, of course, trash)? Although deleted file is disappeared, actually its data is not destroyed right away. Let's say you delete a file of several hundred megabytes and as you can see it happens almost instantly, which could not possibly have happened if the operating system re-records all the clusters of this file. The operating system simply renames deleted file adding a special tag in the beginning of the name. The file is no longer visible - it is marked as deleted, but the information remains in the same place on your hard drive.
Important note: although the data of the deleted files remains on the same location on your hard drive, but now the space is available to be written in a new data at the first request without any reservations. That is it, if the record operation to the place of the deleted file has occurred, then data is lost forever. If there was nothing written down then the deleted file is still possible to recover using special software.
Similar looks the situation of formatting the logical drive. In the usual case format operation re-creates the file allocation table, which states that the entire surface of the disk is empty. However, the earlier data is not intentionally deleted and remains in their places. If new data has not been recorded in the place after the format, then disappeared files in the process of formatting can still be recovered using special software. The same happens when you delete and create logical partitions. A new partition table is created and the new drives are empty, but the old information remains in the same places, though now it can not be accessed using standard operating system. An exception is the so-called low-level format: in this case the entire surface of the hard disk is zeroed, the data disappear forever.
As you can see, a re-recording in the case of data loss is much more dangerous than even disk formatting. Therefore, if it became clear that the data is lost in any case you can not record anything on the same disk and generally better turn it off for as long as no special equipment will be available for search and recovery information. Especially vulnerable in this respect is the system drive C. The operating system is constantly making service records on the system disk, eventually choosing a writable location and re-records deleted files. Important information in any case should not be stored on drive C, even though Microsoft store the default folder "My Documents" always on this disk.
If trouble came - files are missing, the format of the logical disk drive is reformatted or not determined, or not identified or removed logical partitions there is no need to panic. Chances are good that a lot of valuable information still can be restored. As mentioned above, for the complete destruction of data you have to null the entire surface of the hard disk. Usually viruses are faster and produce only superficial damage. In case of failure of hardware or software and the hard drive is physically able to operate, then there can often be FAT corrupted, but clusters with the user information would remain intact.
Recovering data from the hard drive can be done if using special tools that scan the surface, determining the logical structure of the partition and its format to find and retrieve lost files. Of course, there can not be one hundred percent guarantee, but in most cases in a timely and correct approach, it is possible to recover a significant portion of the lost information. It is always better to start the recovery program from another physical disk and in any case not to make any write operations to the disk with lost data.
