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Data Retrieval, Data Recovery

It is very easy to forget how long we can all spend working on an important university or business document or PowerPoint presentation, if you were to add it all up it could amount to days and on occasions weeks but what do you do when you suddenly find the file has simply vanished from your computer.

The first thing to do is to do a search of your folders to make sure you have not saved it in the incorrect folder and if this does not fine the elusive file you can also try having a look in the recycle bin to make sure you have not accidently deleted it. If the file can still not be found then this may be indicative that you are suffering from a degraded drive.

Much as we would like to believe a hard drive will not last forever but has a definitive life expectancy which is often referred to as a mean time between failures (MTB). MTB can often be used as a reference to a drive future reliability and calculations would put expected drive failures at less than 0.1 percent.

But oh if life was so simple!

So the big question is when is the best time to renew my hard drive so it does not suffer from any failures?

This is a very difficult question to answer and also opens up a whole host of other factors that need to be taken into consideration as well.

The first major aspect is of course the use that a computer is put through during its lifespan. Many home users only use their Pc very occasionally and store relatively small numbers of files or photos. In this scenario it would be nice to expect a drive to last over 5 years (don't assume this though).

The same expectation could be applied to the many mid range computer users which includes office Pc's laptops and home desktop systems, where users have a small number of programs in use and small amounts of data or if data is stored on a central server.

But if your system is used for extreme gaming, computer aided design, Digital content creation or virtual prototyping then the hard disk will be working massively harder than in the previous two scenario's so it would only be expected that true life expectancy would be a lot shorter.

High end computer users using high end applications will often have a much shorter expected life of their system, and desktop refresh tends to be around 3 years or so to avoid disk failure and to keep them at the cutting edge of computing productivity which is important for a business.

If a hard working drive's life were to be extended then it would be reasonable to see an increasing ramp up in disk failures over time or drive degradation.

The time between desktop refreshes is often stretched during difficult economic climates but this is not without the greater risk of critical data loss due to failed or degraded drives especially where there is no disaster recovery plan in place.

Any business should in this day and age have effective online data backup and disaster recovery policies in place especially if postponing a business system upgrade.

Another prime factor affecting the longevity of the drive is of course disk maintenance. If your hard drive is allowed to become fragmented then it will have to work an awful lot harder to pick up information and in extreme cases of hard disk fragmentation drives can get very stressed to the point of failure.

Your lost file should be easily recoverable but you do need to bear in mind that any further information written to your hard drive can over write the file you are trying to save. This often happens with data recovery software so if diy recovery is your choice be warned.

Most data recovery services will be able to restore your deleted or lost files even if your drive has degraded and even if your drive has bad sectors that are unreadable hard drive recovery and file recovery are often very successful.

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