When a hard disk drive fails, a backup tape cannot be restored, or your USB pen drops out from your pocket and into your coffee, a data recovery service might be just what you need to get your data back.

Data Recovery can save you from spending three weeks re-doing work, in some cases it can keep a company in business, at the human end of the scale it can recover valuable memories of family members of events when digital photographs have been lost.

What to do if you have lost data? Contact a data recovery company? There are many recovery companies ranging from large multi-national organisations to one-person operations. Some are highly proficient and provide excellent service, others probably less so.

Our advice is as follows:

• If you cannot speak with a technical person who understands your problem then try another company.
• If you are left feeling that your questions have not been answered or that you have been bulldozed towards opting for a service you are not certain that you want, then try another company.

You can can ask technical questions and get straightforward answers via any of the Data Recovery Europe companies listed here, without any obligation.

Yes, we’d like you to send your recovery work to one of our member companies, but what is most important is that you get the service that you require.

From what media can data be recovered? Data can be recovered from any data storage media. It might be a hard drive that is clicking, a RAID array with two failed disks, a backup tape with a read error, or a problem with solid state media. CD and DVD might look sturdy but they can fail just as easily as anything else.

Is data recovery expensive? Well yes it can be but not in every instance. Data recovery stories will tend to focus on the interesting publicity friendly “hard disk caught up in nuclear explosion” type events and the miracle that data was recovered, and not mention that the majority of problems are more straightforward to deal with.

Can data always be recovered? No it cannot, despite the (often far-fetched) stories of amazing data recovery successes, there will always be instances where the damage is too severe, the corruption too extensive, or the data has long since been over-written. There will also be times when the extent of a problem is such that any recovery will require too much work to be economically viable. Despite this, in most instances data can be recovered.

To discuss your problem with a data recovery specialist click on this link.