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Data Recovery can be done, only if...

Data recovery with reasonable degree of success is perfectly possible from a damaged hard disk or other kind of storage media. However, there are several things that can go wrong without our knowing it. Simple things that we do hoping to recover data can in fact turn out to be the worst things we could do if we ever want our data back.

Being new to technical stuff is eminently understandable, but one must take extreme care not to let your technical ignorance spoil the chances of a successful data recovery. As long as you have access to Internet and know how to use everyday search engines like Google or Rediff, there is no excuse for wandering in the wilderness of ignorance, to lend Dante's tongue!

Even attempting to run commonplace disk utilities (that comes bundled with the Operating System) like the scan-disk or check-disk can prove to be costly as it involves writing or even over writing data to your problem hard drive.

Data Recovery - Do your part

Even if you consider yourself to be a "newbie" of illiterate as far as all technical things are considered, there are certain things you can do post-data-loss, that can significantly influence the success of a data recovery attempt. One might even say, your not doing anything would do more good that you doing something in the hope of contributing to a successful data recovery!

Some simple things to be kept in mind are:

Stop using the problem hard disk or storage media from which you want to recover data. Consider this to be of utmost importance as every time you boot up/start a system with the hard disk from which you want to recover data, you are digging your own grave, literally. Work on the problem hard drive only after attaching it to another computer as a secondary/primary slave. Moreover, work on it only for data recovery, not for browsing or gaming!

A seemingly harmless process like browsing, without saving any files of downloading anything can be fatal as the operating system writes and over-writes data to the hard disk, continuously for the entire duration of the time you spent online browsing websites.

Should you load data recovery software on the problem hard disk?

Without any semblance of hesitation, the answer is a BIG NO (72 points, all caps at that! ). If you are attempting data recovery on your own, the first thing you should know is NOT to disturb the problem hard disk. Get that very very clear in your head! Data recovery software should not be loaded on the problem disk. Instead, as mentioned above, load the data recovery software on the good hard disk of the computer to which you have attached your problem hard disk as a primary/secondary slave.

After attaching the problem hard disk, make an image of the disk, using a disk imaging utility and work only on the image thus created. This would leave the data on the hard disk intact and leaves you free to try out any number of data recovery software on the image of the problem hard disk.

Lison Joseph is a contributor at Free-backup.info -- the home of the popular tool for personal online backup -- Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/dos-and-donts-in-data-recovery.html