Is there something more annoying than losing a paper you saved in your computer, on which you worked for weeks? I guess not. For this reason, data recovery is the word of law for people who use computer in their jobs or for school or college.

Many things can cause data loss, such as accidentally deleting files, having your system invaded and corrupted by hackers, power failure when you hadnt saved what you had been writing and other hundreds of possibilities. The truth is: everybody that uses a computer will experience data loss at some point in their lives.

Well, if we are not safe from experiencing data loss, what can help us recover the data weve lost. If we lose something personal, in our homes, it's not as serious as if we lose some important paper from work.

There are mainly two categories of data recovery: Common Recoveries and Complex Recoveries. The first one consists of recovering the data of a single user, either from a floppy disk or hard disk. Complex Recoveries consists of recovering data from a computer with multiple users.

Using data recovery

Many people think that just because they can't find the file in the folder it was saved to means that they have lost the data and they need data recovery. It's not always like this. We may have accidentally changed the location where the file is saved or even renamed it. Before using data recovery, we have to be sure the data is lost. In general, people can use data recovery either if:

- they deleted the file by accident
- they deleted the file, but regretted it later
- the power failed and they haven't saved the information
- they had their data corrupted, usually caused by intruders
- they found some drives or partitions simplly are not accessible.

Recovering data

Experiencing data loss for any reason is really a nuisance. However, recovering the data may not be that difficult.

We in general forget - or simply are not aware - that all the files we lose, especially if we accidentally deleted them, remain in our computer, hidden somewhere where we can no longer see them. In order to recover the data, we just have to find where it is hidden and save it all again.

The best way to recover data without suffering for days and nights in order to accomplish this task has to do with creating backups of important data. You can save your data on CDs or floppy disks in order to always have a second copy of the file in case you lose it. It's important to keep it as up to date as the original saved in the computer because if you don't do that, the files will be different and you lose information in the same way.

Creating backups of data

One of the biggest problems people have is choosing the data to backup. It is a difficult task, we have to admit it. So, here is a simple list of things considered important enough for people create backups of:

- Financial information, including bank records
- E-mail address book
- Important correspondence
- Business information, especially if we are talking about companies and offices that deal with clients
- Papers from school or college
- Personal projects
- Important documents

People can create backups on the computer, however if they experience a theft, fire or flood it will be lost. That's why it's advisable to backup and save files in different places. In order to get the most of your backups, try to follow some guidelines:

- Always backup! If you are a home user, creating backups once a month is a good idea, however, if we are talking about companies and offices, the best option would be to create backups once a week.
- Avoid volatile data, which is data that is not saved in your computer because you are creating it and haven't saved it yet.

- We are humans and we forget things, for this reason configure your computer to create automatic backups.

Safe data recovery

Data recovery is not that simple do to, but it's not impossible either. In order to do data recovery in the right way, the best thing is to observe some rules:

- Don't try to continue doing data recovery if your computer starts making weird noises
- Running the scan disk is not the best option since it puts more pressure onto the system
- Running utilities that you don't know how to deal with can cause even more damage
- Formatting or reinstalling systems is not the solution either.

A last word: the best thing to do is to create backups and keep them up to date in order to avoid the problem of data recovery.