Not long ago my computer stopped working properly and I could not open any internet browsers. This was closely followed by several messages appearing which indicated that several viruses had been detected. A friend of mine who is fairly technically literate had a look at the computer and told me the virus had totally wiped everything from the hard drive – documents, photos, etc plus the operating system. Obviously I am fairly devastated and not being technically literate I am unsure what to do. Can you advise whether it would be possible to recover the deleted data?

There are several possibilities regarding the current state of the data which has been lost. First, it is possible that the data is still on the hard drive but the drive has just become unbootable. Your friend could have easily mistaken a non-bootable computer as “everything has been wiped” since not being able to boot the computer makes the recovery of the data located on the hard drive rather difficult for the average user. However, should this be the case it would be relatively easy for a computer technician to connect your hard drive to a different computer and then copy the relevant data to another location (such as an external hard drive or set of DVDs) so that it can be copied back onto the computer once the problem has been fixed, most likely by completing a reinstallation of Windows on that computer.

That said, it is equally likely that the data has been entirely deleted from the computer. This is the more serious scenario as the possibility of recovering the data is significantly less in this stage and depends on a number of factors. When data is deleted from a computer it is not immediately removed from the hard drive. Instead, the references to the data on the hard drive are removed from the file system and the space which the data occupied is flagged to be overwritten. This means that if space is needed in the future then the space which that data occupied can be re-used. So, if the locations on the hard drive which stored your data have not been overwritten then it is possible to recover the data. This will depend on how much the hard drive has been used since the problem occurred as subsequent uses of the drive could have resulted in new data being written to the hard drive potentially in the areas which were occupied by data that you wish to recover.

As a first step, I would not attempt to do any more recovery yourself since if the data has been deleted then you are going to make the recovery of the data much more difficult (and, in some cases, impossible if the existing data has been overwritten). At this point since the data seems to be quite important I would recommend that you enlist the help of a professional data recovery company. This is generally not something that your local computer technician can do, but instead you will need to send the drive away either interstate (or in some cases, overseas) for the data recovery. This can be a fairly expensive process but the pricing is usually based on the severity of the data loss and difficulty of recovery, so if the data is easy to recover it should cost less than the situation where the data is difficult to recover. There are many data recovery services available and two of the main companies offering this service are Drive Savers (www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com) and Ontrack Data Recovery (www.ontrackdatarecovery.com.au). Usually the way such companies work is you send the drive away and they will provide an evaluation (which may cost a fee) giving you the price range for the data recovery itself. At that point you can then decide whether to proceed with the data recovery or not. Should you decide to proceed then the data will be recovered onto another drive (such as a USB drive) and returned to you with the original drive.

As you can probably tell, having to enlist the assistance professional data recovery can be a time consuming and costly exercise. Therefore, I would strongly suggest in the future that you keep an up to date backup of all the important data contained on your computer. On my own systems I run an hourly backup which copies any new or changed data to an external 1 TB hard drive every hour. This happens automatically without any user intervention, which is a very important consideration – ensure that any backup is completed automatically and does not require you to manually trigger the backup, otherwise you will often forget (or get complacent about running the backup), resulting in not having an up to date backup. This is why the old backup method of manually copying and pasting any data that you wish to keep across to a USB drive is simply not acceptable anymore as your primary backup – an automated backup solution is a must.

For those users who are running Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or 10.6 (Snow Leopard) there is a utility called Time Machine built into the operating system which automatically can backup to an external hard drive. This literally requires you to connect a drive, set the drive as a Time Machine backup drive, and that’s it. Windows 7 includes a similar feature called “Backup and Restore” which allows you to select folders and libraries to backup across to an external drive. Unfortunately while earlier versions of Windows (such as Windows XP and Windows Vista) do have backup utilities they are nowhere near as intuitive or user-friendly, so if you are still using these older operating systems you may wish to consider using a third-party utility to manage your backups. One product that I have used in the past is Acronis True Image Home (www.ontrackdatarecovery.com.au) and while I have not used the latest version of this product the previous versions certainly offered a very good backup solution. This software is also compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 and may offer additional advanced features which even Windows 7 users may like to consider if the in-built backup solution does not meet their needs.

Lastly, while we have been talking about backup software and systems we are yet to discuss backup media. As mentioned previously, I backup my systems to an external 1 TB hard drive. The main reason for this approach is the very fast speed at which I can backup across to the drive (using either USB 2.0, Firewire 800, or eSATA), the low cost of this backup media (since the price of storage is very cheap relative to other alternatives, as a 1 TB drive can be purchased for around $100 - $150) and the pure convenience of not having to juggle and change DVDs or backup tapes. It is true that hard drives can suffer mechanical faults, but the convenience and cost-benefits which backing up to a hard drive offers certainly outweighs the potential risk of the backup drive failing at exactly the same time as the hard drive inside your computer. The main thing is to ensure that should your backup drive fail you get a replacement drive as soon as possible so that you can re-establish your backup regime in case disaster strikes!

If you are particularly worried about the data on your computer then it is always worthwhile to consider keeping an off-site backup of your data. Before the proliferation of high-speed broadband internet this was a difficult task, but now there are many online backup services which allow you to push your data securely to a remote location for the purpose of backup. If you are interested in this alternative then see the Tip of the Week for more information.