How to Use Hard Drive Data Recovery Software

Sooner or later you will boot up your computer and see a question mark, sad Mac or other icon to indicate your hard drive is no longer working. Fortunately you can find a number of disk recovery programs, and most work the same. Here is a quick review of how to use data recovery software.

1. Backup your hard drive at every opportunity. If your disk recovery software doesn't solve this problem, you can always reformat and restore the backup.

2. Purchase your software before your drive crashes. Install the available protection options. The best recovery software creates a backup of your drive's directory that it can use to quickly recover the file structure.

3. Routinely run drive diagnostics. At least check your disk controller and run read/write tests to make sure your software can read from all the sectors on the drive disks. Run a surface scan to map out bad disk sectors when you have the time (this will take a while).

4. Conduct volume and file performance and maintenance tests. These will check your directory and file structures to make sure the data isn't damaged. Check the repair files option to fix any problems during the check. This may fix your drive without resorting to data recovery.

5. Optimize your drive. When files are being written they are broken up into data chunks and written to the first available space, even if the spaces are in different locations. Optimization rewrites the files to contiguous sectors making seek time and write time faster.

6. Run data recovery if your hard drive does crash. If you installed the protection files, the software will rewrite your disk from the most recent directory backup. Otherwise, it will look for any recognizable files and copy them to another drive.

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