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Hard drive health matters in hard drive recovery

Several factors determine the success rate of a hard drive recovery. Do not lose hope yet! There is both good news and bad news in the above piece of information. The bad news is that some of these factors are beyond our control. The good news is that some of these factors can be made favorable if we take adequate care.

One of the important problems faced during hard drive recovery is the fragmentation of data, meaning the scattering of different fragments of a single file or related files on different parts of a hard drive. This is bound to happen over a period of time, especially with the constant writing and deleting of data from a hard drive. If you keep a few things in mind about how data is fragmented and how it can be managed, then you can keep your hard drive in a better health.

What leads to fragmentation, which makes hard drive recovery difficult?

The operating system picks certain pieces of data when the system calls for related applications or programs and then write these data back when they are not in use. Hence, over a period of time, depending on where on the hard drive free space is available, data slowly gets fragmented.

For instance, a big file may be stored at four or five different locations on the drive, because at that particular point in time when the operating system was writing the data back, the allocation of free space allowed only such a fragmented distribution. In case of a hard drive crash, recovery of these files, which are fragmented/scattered all over the disk, becomes a difficult task, especially if the partition and file system on the disk is damaged.

A small but important thing to know is that frequent installation and un-installation of software as well as frequent copying and deletion of files on the hard drive is one of the important factors that lead to file fragmentation.

How can you combat data fragmentation for a better hard drive recovery?

There are a few simple things you can do to reverse the effect of data fragmentation. There is a small disk management utility that comes bundled with the windows operating system called the disk de-fragmenter. The primary task of disk de-fragmenter is to scan the disk and arrange data in such a way that there is least fragmentation of the files stored on the disk. It is a time consuming process and depending on the size of the hard disk and the amount of data stored on the hard disk, it might take anywhere between half an hour to four or five hours for a session of disk de-fragmenting.

So make it a point to schedule the disk de-fragemented to work on your hard drive when you are not working, like when you go to sleep, but make sure that there is power backup to tide over an unexpected power failure. If your pattern of using the system involves frequent copying and deletion of files or frequent installation and un-installation of software, then ensure that the data stored on your hard drive is not fragment beyond acceptable limits because less fragmentation of data means better chances of recovering your data if you end up with the un-enviable task of hard drive recovery.