As a professional writer, I spend a tremendous amount of time on my laptop computer. It is my livelihood. I take along when I travel. I even use it to write while riding in planes, trains and automobiles. I have literally thousands of MS Word documents of things I have written or am in the process of written. Some of them have been sent out for publication, and some of them haven’t. They represent not only a record of things I have done, but many, many hours that I have invested for future income. The loss of those files through hard drive failure would make a nasty dent in my future income for quite some time.

I know the importance of making back-up copies, and I do make copies of most of what I’m working on. I have flash memory cards, USB flash drives, and even CDs all over the place with files on them. I have SD cards dedicated to particular clients or publishers. The latest files, of course, are always on the laptop. The trouble with all the little memory cards and USB drives, is that they’re small and they get lost. From time to time, the USB drives even get dropped and stepped on (it has happened to me on more than one occasion). All of which means that if a hard drive does fail unexpectedly, I may have recent back-up copies of everything, or I may not.

If a hard drive is having trouble booting up, or start experiences frequent freeze-ups. I make doubly sure that I have current back-up copies stored safely, but sometimes, either through accident or just failing for no obvious reason, computer hard drives just stop working with little or no notice. For those times, it’s important to know that all is not necessarily lost. Professional data recovery services can usually pull your important files from a failed hard drive or even from a crushed USB drive or SD card.

Professional data recovery houses are staffed by experts in pulling data from damaged media. They don’t just run common commercially available software that can end up destroying whatever vestiges of data were left on the damaged media, they get into real forensic data recovery using techniques not altogether unlike those used by police or government agency experts to recover data that is critical to national security or a criminal investigation.

The best data recovery companies won’t charge you unless they get your files back for you. Those who do charge before they give you results are only showing their lack of confidence in their own ability to produce those results. I keep current contact information for a top quality data recovery house in my old-school paper Rolodex for emergencies, because when you need a data recovery house, it’s usually too late to look them up on the internet, until you buy a new laptop.