Have you ever worked on a Word document for hours only to lose everything you’ve written due to a power surge or some other inexplicable blip? Maybe you have a report for work that you’ve been writing for weeks and one day you try to open it, only to find it has somehow vanished. Panic sets in as you realize that all that work and all that time is gone instantly. Everyone has probably experienced this phenomenon and has learned the simple lesson to always have multiple backup files saved in multiple places. There is also the option of data recovery.

Data recovery simply means there may be a way to get back the document that you have lost. Maybe you have the data, but it has been damaged, or corrupted. Or, maybe it is there on the screen but you can’t access it to make changes or to print. What has gone wrong? Sometimes there is physical damage to your storage device. It is also possible that a child has gotten his or her hands (or mouth) onto your CD or your DVD and caused damage. However, it is very common that when you lose data it is because of an operating system failure. If this is the case, you can simply copy your files to another disk. You can use a Live CD, which moves your files from the system disk to a form of backup media.

There are of course other failures, and these can be mitigated as well. Sometimes you may have accidentally deleted a file or files. In actuality, these deleted files are not truly gone, they just don’t show up anymore as being on your computer and the computer frees up the space they occupy, to overwrite them at a later time. So, there is hope: the original file is still there and you can get it back. Data recovery is always a viable option.