Ways to Salvage Data After A Computer Crash

Have you ever had a computer crash? It is traumatic. Sure, you have an external hard drive where all of your important documents are backed up. But what about that presentation you were working on? And what about those photos of your family? Of course, some of them might already be uploaded to Facebook…but not all of them are, and it would be just your luck if the ones that weren’t uploaded had the best meaning. Here are some strategies for salvaging data after a computer crash.

What to do when your computer crashes? First, don’t panic. Second, back up.

You’ve probably heard that advice before, but have you actually done it? You should. Your data is valuable, and there are lots of ways to lose it: hard drive failure, fire, theft, and so on. How long would it take you to recreate it? If you can’t even guess the answer to that question, your backup plan probably needs work.

I got my first Mac in 1992, and a few months later the hard disk crashed. The Apple Store charged me $250 to replace it. I was annoyed—the computer cost $2000—but I thought of myself as reasonably prepared: I’d been copying my work directory onto floppy disks every night for months.

It’s a good thing that Apple had a repair service in those days, because it took me about two weeks to realize that all those floppies contained data only from the last month or so. I had been overwriting them every day, in my innocence believing they held all my data permanently.

If you have a backup and didn’t make any mistakes (say, by saving over the original file), then there are two possibilities: either your computer is broken, or the file you’re trying to open is.

If the backup won’t open either, the problem is probably with your computer. In that case, forget about https://www.salvagedata.com/; just try to get your computer working again.

If the backup will open but the original won’t, the problem is probably with the original file. Something may have happened during saving that corrupted it.

If you don’t have a backup and you know what changes you made to each version of the file, where you saved them, and which version was corrupted, you can sometimes salvage all those changes by reconstructing an earlier version from later ones. For example, if you were writing an essay that grew linearly from one version to the next:

Version 1 was all right.

Version 2 was okay too; it just added a paragraph at the end.

Version 3 was okay, but in addition to adding a new paragraph at the end it also changed a word in an earlier paragraph (for example, changed “their” to “there”).

Version 4 was okay, but in addition to all those changes it also.

If you’re using a Macintosh, the odds are pretty good that your hard disk contains a copy of your files as they were last week, or last month. The Mac OS includes a built-in backup program called Time Machine, which copies everything on your hard disk to an external drive whenever it detects that the drive has been disconnected and then reconnected. If you’ve been using Time Machine, recovering after a crash is easy: just start up from your backup drive and copy back to your main drive any files that didn’t come back when you restored the system.

Conclusion

If you have accidentally deleted files, or formatted your hard drive and lost precious files you had no backup of, there are a few things you can try to salvage some of your lost information. Your chances will vary depending on the nature and amount of data loss, but if it is something that matters to you, I would definitely look into these options before giving up. Hopefully, you never have the experience of losing important data like this, but it’s better to be prepared than to suffer unexpected tragedy. Good luck!