Hard Drive data recovery,doing it the easy way.

This post is all about HDD data recovery. We are going to discuss about various cases under which data  might get lost and how to recover it, but first it is important for us to understand the various scenarios under which file(s) might get lost.

Accidental Deletion

This I think is the most general case,most of the people (including me) are so used to hit SHIFT+DEL directly that they sometimes lose important data.There's a high probability
of data recovery under this case since only the file index is removed and the actual file still resides on hard drive until overwritten by some other data.

Format

This is the second case where data loss occurs due to accidental formatting of the storage device.This must be kept in mind that there are two types of format options available to us,

one is the QUICK FORMAT option while other is the FULL FORMAT option the probability of data recovery in quick format option is much greater than that of the full format, the reason behind this is quick format removes data entry only from the index but not the actual data on the contrary full format removes not only the index  but also the data itself.

 

Key to Successful  Data Recovery

The deleted data on the hard drive must not be overwritten by some other data.

As soon as you realize that something has gone wrong just make sure that you perform no write operation on that partition of the disk.

OK so that's enough now let's get working.The software that we are going to use in here is TestDisk you can get it here.

TestDisk

Once downloaded extract the contents of the zip file to a safe location of your hard drive.

By safe I mean partition other than from where the data has to be recovered and then run TestDisk.exe as administrator an then follow the onscreen instructions.One more thing the source and target drive used for recovery purpose must not be the same ,this is crucial since

if you overwrite some data on the source volume then it is for sure that the recovery information will get corrupt.