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Regardless of the reason, your best insurance in the event of a computer crash is to have a good backup. The existence of a backup is often the thing that makes the difference between a disaster and an inconvenience. My recommended backup plan for your home computer rests on 2 basic strategies... Using a local backup, and using an off-site backup Local Document Backups - On a regular basis, every user's document folder and other critical files should be backed up to a flash drive, ZIP disks, CD's, other removable media, or an external hard drive. This allows critical data to be restored in the unlikely event that both the primary and backup drives on a computer should fail. With the drop in prices of these methods, it would be crazy not to be backing up your documents, photos, tax returns, etc. Off-Site Network Backup - On an automated basis (usually every night), a persons most critical documents are gathered, compressed, password-protected, and automatically uploaded to an Internet server in another geographic location. This enables you to recover its critical documents and to rebuild itself even in the event that your home is destroyed by a fire, a flood or other natural disaster, or an act of war or terrorism. There are a number of excellent companies for offsite backup, but one of my favorites is Mozy Remote Backup. They offer 2 gb storage for free, and unlimited online backup for only $4.95 a month -- an outstanding deal for home users and small businesses. They also offer customized plans for businesses, servers, and any other type of situation in which backup is required. A good idea would be to check out multiple places and make an informed decision. "Oh no, it's all gone! All my data is gone, and I didn't back up!"
Words none of us ever want to utter. But the fact is, if you use a computer long enough, chances are that someday you'll experience a crash or disaster involving data loss. Lost data can often be recovered, but your chances of getting your data back dwindle with each keystroke. Every time your computer accesses its hard drive, there's a chance that another piece of lost data is being overwritten and rendered permanently irrecoverable. So the most important thing to do if your data seems to have disappeared is to stop using the computer. Just turn it off. Then call a data recovery professional in your area.
Where Does Lost Data Go? Usually nowhere. In Windows, "deleting" a file doesn't actually remove it from the hard drive. You can restore the file by right-clicking on the Recycle Bin icon and selecting "Restore." If you empty the recycle bin, the computer's reference to the file is removed and the space it formerly occupied is marked as being available for new data. But until the old data is actually overwritten by new data, the file remains where it was and usually can be recovered by a computer professional using specialized software. In fact, early in the history of the PC, security-conscious organizations (like the military) recognized this as a weakness, and a cottage industry has developed that specializes in software that overwrites "deleted" files with multiple layers of binary gibberish, thus rendering the data irrecoverable.
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