Data Loss Prevention And Recovery

Tips And Suggestions

Data Loss Prevention

Avoid moving or bumping your computer, especially when it is powered on, this will prevent hard drive crashes.

Protect your computer against power surges with a power surge protector or better yet, with an uninterruptible power supply.

Back up important data regularly. If your hard drive fails, you can restore your data to a new hard drive.

Turn off your computer when not in use. Besides the risk of power surges, an earthquake can shake you computer that might cause a hard drive crash.

Avoid operating your computer in extreme temperatures or high humidity.

Install anti-virus software on your computer. This will help protect your computer from viruses that might delete your data.

Install firewall software to block worms that might try to delete your data.

Data Recovery

If your computer will not power up, reseat the power cable going to the hard drive.

If your computer will not power up, reseat both ends of the data cable.

If your computer will not power up, try plugging the data cable into the secondary controller.

If you receive the following error message “Missing Operating System”, check your floppy drive or CD/DVD drive, your computer may be trying to boot from these drives rather than your hard drive.

If you hear your hard drive making very unusual noises, turn off the computer immediately. The noise is probably due to a hard drive crash.

Do not run Scandisk to fix data loss situations, as this may cause some of the sectors to be non-recoverable.

Do not copy or move any files to the hard drive containing your lost data. This may overwrite the lost data.