In the middle of an evening at home with friends, they want to see your vacation photos. Perfect timing, your computer is just a few meters away. You grab it, turn it on, and within seconds, you’re surprised to discover that your photos are gone! Impossible to find them.
How could this have happened? The shock quickly turns to panic as you browse through your computer’s folders and realize you’ve just lost all your data. There were family videos, administrative documents, movies and music: in short, your entire digital life.
The solution: turn to data recovery professionals
The first instinct to have is the good old word-of-mouth method.
How do you find the right one? Simply by asking around among your family or friends. If they’ve already been through this ordeal, ask them which reliable company helped them solve their problem. It goes without saying that if someone in your family has already experienced this kind of incident, they’ll easily understand your distress and can give you the right contact to help you.
Let’s be clear from the start: never attempt to recover data from your computer yourself. While this solution may seem tempting, you mainly risk wasting time and money, and making a proper recovery by a professional even harder.
So then, how should you proceed? Forget the free software you can download online that promises to recover all your files. The only solution is to find a serious company that will do everything possible so you can recover all of your data.
How to find the company you need?
If no one you know can give you proper advice, you’ll need to venture into the jungle of data recovery professionals to find what you’re looking for.
And you’ll need to be careful not to hand over your precious storage media to just any company.
How do you achieve this? You’ll need to check a few points beforehand:
- Customer reviews. Although they should be read with some caution, especially the very positive or completely negative ones, they’ll give you an overall and accurate picture of the professional you’re about to contact.
- Recovery across many types of storage media. Even if your case only involves your hard drive, it’s better to contact someone who knows how to recover data from a server just as well as from a memory card. The versatility of the company you contact shows that it has experience in this field.
- A complete, personalized quote with a reasonable turnaround time. Before taking on your case, the company must be able to find and explain to you the solution that will be implemented to solve your problem.
- Make sure the professional is able to handle data loss resulting from an electronic failure, such as a damaged component on a hard drive. Not to mention a mechanical failure caused, for example, by mishandling a memory card. Finally, failures caused by a cyberattack or accidental file deletion.
Generally speaking, even if the urgency of the situation might push you to contact the first company you come across, take the time to get a sense of the contact you’ve just found.
The initial customer contact, attentiveness, availability, professionalism, etc. are all points that deserve your attention.
Finally, ask about after-sales support: make sure that once the data recovery has been completed, the professional you contacted remains available. That way, they can explain to you how they managed to find the source of the problem and carry out a proper recovery of your data. They may even give you some tips and tricks to avoid facing this unpleasant situation again.
Prevention is better than cure
How can you avoid finding yourself in this situation again? The best way to avoid the hassle of data loss relies on a simple yet highly effective principle: a proper backup of your files. Indeed, remember to make a copy of your most precious files on a second storage device, such as an external hard drive, for example. Inexpensive, small, lightweight, and with proper storage capacity: it will follow you everywhere, and you can easily use it on another computer, for example.