It's a nightmarish scenario: your little brother accidentally deletes all your family photos, a laptop goes dead on you just when you need a document stored on it (and nowhere else!), or a USB drive suddenly becomes inaccessible.
As they say: prevention is the best medicine - but what if there is no back up available? The old adage of not knowing what you got until you lose it, has gotten a modern twist in times of personal computers and other devices that produce - and store - a vast amount of electronic data.
You can't even imagine how valuable your data is - until you lose it! The agony of being confronted with the dreaded "blue screen of death" when urgently needing some important files from your computer is a prime example of an everyday crisis in our data and technology driven world.
You may think that your treasured family photographs are safe, stored on a CD or DVD medium, but did you know that all physical discs have an expiration date? Besides, any physical media can be broken, scratched, or lost.
What about the critical business data you have on your desktop computer or on a laptop? One day, you may find your hard drive inaccessible, and when you go to device manager, it just shows a yellow exclamation mark with no further information - let alone instructions - provided.
You have no clue what to do, you only know you need a document for today's presentation - now! A laptop, where you have stored half of your personal and career life on, suddenly and without a warning goes dead.
Or, when you try to log in it tells you about some cryptic error and that it needs formatting! But - all the data is still on it, and it will all be lost if you format! Your laptop has no answers, it just stupidly blinks its blue light, indifferent to your agony.
Or maybe you just have accidentally deleted some important data! It happens to all of us...
A moment of absent-mindedness, and that Excel sheet you labored on for nights is gone! May I scare you into backing up your files with another imaginary scenario? You congratulate yourself on reformatting your hard drive without asking a techie for help, only to realize a moment later that not all data you need was backed-up.
Now what? Remember: disasters often come without warning, so backing up your data is a must! It will offer you the peace of mind you need if and when your critical data is lost.
When trying to restore data by yourself, you can certainly try using system tools that come installed with Windows: system restore, system repair, or last good configuration may sometimes help.
Booting up in safe mode is the next recommended course of action: there, you must proceed using some data recovery software to begin the data rescue procedure.
Data recovery software is a type of software you really hope you won't ever need, but in a situation where your whole business or delicate personal data is at stake, it does provide an urgently needed and much welcomed relief!