Help! All my work! My records, photos, music.. It's all gone!

Losing something that was important enough to slave over for months, even years, is a shock to the system to say the least. It does unleash an overwhelming flood of feelings - loss, fear, anger.. (we know, we've been there too!) Only a few moments ago, everything seemed fine. Suddenly the world has vanished from under our feet. It feels like a freefall. Help! Someone! Anyone!

We do understand. Truly sorry. Often happens when you're already stretched to the limit.. and no time for backing up..

But while we understand the feeling, we also know that getting angry with the disk drive and hurling it across the room (true story) will not improve your chances of recovering the very data that you've lost... So, take things slow. Be as rational as you can. Make yourself a tea. Go for a walk...

Just don't rush - it is too easy to do something that can't be undone!

Next, get your bearings. Find out what's actually gone wrong with the device and what options you have. Do you have backups? How old are they? Do you have hard copies or test prints of the important stuff? Emailed copies? Take stock.

It is actually quite rare for the data to be completely gone. (It takes a lot of time to overwrite gigabytes of data..)

At the same time, beware: pushing a device that is barely alive is generally the fastest way to kill it completely (because the operating system will keep retrying to access the parts that are failing. Repeated reties are likely to damage the heads and/or the disk surface and make recovery much more onerous). Particularly in such situations, extracting the raw sectors sequentially onto a good drive is fast and relatively inexpensive. We would only focus on the unreadable areas after all else has been retrieved - and some missing data structures can be rebuilt.

In many situations, it is quite feasible to recover everything, just the way it was and it doesn't have to cost the earth. In addition, some types of data are much more easily recognisable than others - things like JPG photos and many others can be extracted even from a hard disk that has been completely erased. But we are running ahead of ourselves.

Let's look at your device. What's ACTUALLY wrong with it?

Usually, just listening to the noises it makes can give a lot of information: Does it spin up? Does it go through its usual motions when getting ready? What messages do you get?