Data Recovery

Data Recovery is an art as well as a science. The art is in asking the right questions to find out what went wrong in the first place, and then choosing the right tools and methodology to recover what can be rescued. The science is in having and using the correct state of the art software tools to carry out the recovery, and in understanding how different file systems actually store data.

It is well known to most professional IT engineers that most apparently devastating crashes, acts of sabotage, or (more normal) moments of madness do NOT typically destroy all stored data. They often destroy the path to that data used by the operating system. At its most basic, data recovery consists of rebuilding those paths or, if this is not possible, rescuing fragments of vital files and rebuilding the files themselves.

After a major data loss, we recommend shutting down and not using the computer again until it can be looked at. Even better, call us before you shut down. If you continue to use the machine, it will gradually write new data over the top of what you may want to recover. Even shutting down can lose data as open files are saved and closed.

Common Issues. HastNet has good experience of data recovery, often in circumstances where Backups are not available for whatever reason. We have dealt successfully with most of the accounting packages including Sage and Quickbooks, and with data base programmes using SQL, MySQL or proprietary designs. We also regularly recover Microsoft Outlook data for customers, often when files have been allowed to balloon in size and become corrupted.