What’s worse? Hearing a strange noise from your hard drive, or just realizing you formatted the wrong disk? When either of these happens your mind simultaneously contemplates the thought of losing your precious data, and how much time and effort is going to be required to recover it.
And then a few seconds later it tries to remember when you last backed up. Was it a week ago? A month? It’s around this time you either start swearing violently at your screen.
Assess the cause
The first thing to do is calm down, and figure out what exactly is the cause of the problem. If the computer doesn’t boot at all it could be a problem with the processor or motherboard. That means your data can be easily retrieved.
Did you accidentally delete files, delete a partition, or format your drive?
Is the drive mounting? Can you see it under Disk Utility? Maybe the directory structure is corrupt and needs repairing.
Or did you hear the drive making strange noises before and after it failed?
When you have figured out what the cause of the problem is, you can start working towards the correct solution.
Data recovery options
If you have determined that it is indeed the hard drive you’re left with a couple of options for recovering the data.
If the hard drive failed because of physical damage and it will no longer spin up, the only option is to send it to a specialist data recovery service. It’s not worth trying to repair yourself as you could just make it worse.
You can detect physical damage on a hard drive by the sound it makes when you try to start it. If it’s making loud clicking, clunking or whirring noises then it’s physical damage. A dead hard drive can be difficult and expensive to recover your data from. If you have a backup, ditch the drive and get a new one. Copy your backup to the new drive.
If your data loss is due to deleted files, a deleted partition, or reformatting the drive you can probably recover the data yourself with third party software. And if the drive is not mounting or is giving you errors it might be possible to repair any damage using OSX’s built-in Disk Utility app.
Data recovery utilities
OSX Disk Utility
Found in the Utilities folder under Applications, OSX’s built-in Disk Utility will let you verify and repair file permissions, and verify and repair your disk’s integrity. As well as a host of other options such as deleting, partitioning, cloning, mounting and unmounting drives.
Disk Utility is useful if your drive won’t mount or if you’re having trouble accessing files because of a damaged directory structure. Assuming it’s a secondary drive and not the drive you boot to, open Disk Utility, click on your hard drive name and click Repair Disk. If you can’t boot try booting using the recovery partition. Insert your OSX disc and hold down the C key while starting.
If you have accidentally deleted files, deleted a partition, or formatted a drive then Disk Utility won’t be able to help. But you can still recover the data. When files are deleted from your drive they still actually exist. They are just flagged as Free Space and will be overwritten when you add new data. So to recover these deleted files it’s best to act quickly.
When a file is deleted or a drive is formatted the file’s name and folder are usually permanently lost, but the contents are still recoverable. When you do recover the files you will need to open them to determine what it contents are. This can be very time consuming, but the most important thing is your data hasn’t been lost. There are a number of applications you can run to recover this data. Here are the most popular.
Data Recovery 3
Data Rescue 3 is probably the most popular data recovery software for Macs. The software focuses purely recovering data rather than trying to repair disks. The program will recover files whether the disk just fails to mount or if you’ve reformatted the whole drive. And it comes with a boot disk in case you can’t boot your computer up at all. It will also recover files from external drives, including drives formatted for Windows.
I have used Data Rescue 3 to clone data on a corrupt drive that won’t mount. It worked very well, although it was quite slow. But that didn’t concern me once I had all of my data back. Data Recovery 3 costs $90 and has so far proved very valuable to me.
Disk Warrior
The other popular data recovery software for Macs is called Disk Warrior. As well as recovering your lost or deleted files, Disk Warrior can repair corrupt directories by rebuilding them and will cure strange error messages thrown up by OSX’s Disk Utility.
Disk Warrior is a good choice for recovering files from corruption if Disk Utility can’t help you. And while it can recover lost files, Data Recovery 3’s ability to do aggressive and deep scans probably makes it a better choice. By buying either program you will get full support and help in recovering your data.
Conclusion
When it comes to recovering your data you really need to determine the cause of the data loss. If it’s corrupt directory structures you may be able to repair it using Apple’s free Disk Utility app. But if that doesn’t work you can try Disk Warrior.
If you’ve accidentally deleted files you’ll need to use an expensive data recovery service or use software such as Data Rescue 3. If the hard drive is completely dead and making loud noises you might be able to recover the data by sending the drive to a data recovery service, however, it could take a lot of time and it will be expensive.
Above all else, the most important thing when it comes to data recovery is to prevent the need to arise at all. You do this by making regular backups! Because hard drives fail all the time.
