RECOVER YOUR DATA

Nothing is lost until you’ve looked for it, says Alex Cox.

Imagine with us: The worst has happened. Everything you held dear is gone. You ignored the clicking of the hard drive, those error messages, that suspiciouslooking file for too long. You clicked the thing you shouldn’t have clicked. You emptied the Recycle Bin out of habit after letting your kids near your PC. And now? Now your photos are gone, your documents are dust, those precious family videos cast to the wind. Windows has gasped its last breath. All is lost.

Except that isn’t necessarily the case. Data has a habit of hanging around. And if you’re very lucky, and very careful, you could — in this hypothetical scenario — get all, or the vast majority, of your data back. Note that we’re not going to be able to help you a huge amount in the case of massive hardware failure or physical damage, so if you’ve inadvertently sent 120V to that SSD, or unwisely dunked your laptop in the bath, you’re either going to be on the hook for specialist clean room data recovery, which could set you back thousands of dollars, if it works, or completely out of luck.

If you’re not just imagining things, and everything does appear to have gone, stop using your PC immediately and read on. And if everything seems fine, read on anyway. You might learn a few things that’ll save your bacon one day, and we’ll help you get your hands on some tools that every home computer pro should have waiting in their back pocket for the worst of times.

And don’t worry — we’ve not discounted the possibility that Windows has simply collapsed under its own weight, rendering your precious data comfortably stored, but otherwise inaccessible. By accessing your drive from another operating system entirely, you’ll be able to get all that stuff back, too. And hey, if you fancy doing a bit of digital forensics, but your drives are currently in a good state, why not delete a few old files from a USB stick and follow along?