You haven’t been backing up your hard drive on a regular basis, and now you’ve lost all your work files, your emails, photos and even your playlist! It’s downright depressing, but fret not as there are effective solutions to address this. What you need to do is take a deep breath, keep a level head, set aside the things you don’t have control over, and figure out what’s worth saving.

As hopeless as it seems

Even the most knowledgeable and cautious among us face some form of data loss in our lives. While this can be a result of an electrical problem or a defective hardware configuration, it still is a devastating experience. If all hope seems gone, there are always various means we can turn to alleviate the nuisance of having to recover lost information.

Get Professional Help

First, you’ve got to realize that even if you can handle general repair and troubleshooting of your computer, data recovery is something that requires the assistance of an experienced technician. These professionals are specially trained to address these specific issues and not only perform recovery of missing data, but also be able to repair any damage that occurred on your hard drive. Confirm that the technician has reasonable experience handling similar hard drive brand and operating system. You don’t want to end up with more damage on your system than what you already have.

RAID Configuration – What is this?

Check if your computer operates on multiple disk drives, or what is called a RAID configuration. If this is so, then recovery of your data could be a bit easier. You can try to do this by yourself by removing the specific hard drive that is not working. You can choose to replace it with a new one, or opt to have it refurbished. The remaining hard drives which are not damaged should be able to restore the missing data. However, one drawback of having a system with multiple hard drives is that in cases of multiple failures, you are forced to bring all these drives to a professional computer technician to get them fixed.

Life after Repair

Now that you’re back up and running, it may be the best time to consider planning for unexpected events. If you were able to understand how the first problem occurred, use this information to set-up some form of preventive computer maintenance. Perform regular back-ups and take the extra step by regularly checking that your anti-virus system is updated.