Working with huge amounts of information? You know the desperate moment when you realize that you need something that you deleted a long time ago. This is the topic of this post : How to recover deleted files which were deleted long time ago? First lets start with some general data recovery tips, valid for all type of data devices, PC’s, Mac’s, phones.

Have a data recovery program ready for use. When your hard drive goes bad and you lose valuable files and documents, it’s time to turn on your favorite data recovery software solution and recover everything back from the bad hard drive. We highly recommended Disk Drill for Windows and Mac OS X. The main advantages of Disk Drill are its ease of use, support for more than 200 file formats and all common storage devices, including iOS and Android smartphone and tablets.

It’s a bit simpler on a Mac, using an intimidating-sounding tool called target disk mode. You connect a nonworking Mac to a working Mac and treat that nonworking Mac like a big USB drive. This can be useful if, for example, you need to get files off a computer with a screen or keyboard that doesn’t work. Connect the two computers with a USB-C, Thunderbolt 2, or Firewire cable. On the broken Mac, turn it on, and press and hold the T key while it starts up. Or, if the Mac is already turned on, go to Apple (on the upper left of the screen) -> System Preferences -> Startup Disk -> Target Disk Mode.

Is the drive making clicking noises on connecting or accessing? As mentioned earlier, this is a job for the data recovery service center or professionals. Is the drive detected by the computer and spinning but hangs on accessing? Such a scenario is an indication of a large amount of bad sectors. This usually happens to hard drive with years of continued usage. Either use free BIOS accessing utilities that can skip bad sectors to read the data or send the drive to a data recovery service center if you’re not sure, but want the data recovered.

Having covered the ‘deleted data’ section of data recovery is all good and well, but what happens if your drive is not even being detected by your machine? Or your machine can see the drive, but just hangs when you try to access it? What about if the drive is completely dead and won’t even spin up? Let’s briefly cover the main components of a drive, see which components can fail, and what symptoms each failure might exhibit. PCB: This is the (often green) circuit board attached to the bottom of your drive. It houses the main controller (the equivalent of your computer’s CPU) along with many other electronic controllers. This is the interface that turns your 0s and 1s from the platter into usable data that your computer can understand.

Older laptops that were constructed with traditional hard drives were fairly simple to pop open and fix. You could unscrew a few screws holding the case together, and then plug into the drive via a universal SATA port to retrieve the data. Opening the actual drive itself is not without risk, or advisable, as dust could and will enter the drive, causing contamination and potentially additional damage during the process. For example, older drives would be subject to something called stiction, and sometimes became ‘stuck’, whereby the head and actuator were locked or stuck and the motor failed to spin, causing the hard drive platters to spin improperly. One trick that had some reported success involved placing a hard drive in the freezer, which would cause the metal to contract and become unstuck, at least long enough to offload the data.

Do Your Data Recovery is the tool that you need to use in order to get all your files recovered, and you only need a few clicks to do it. One thing to considerate: If you want to recover all your data, do not save any new data on it, because it will reduces the chance of success. Read more info on Recycle bin data recovery.