This week, Michael O’Dwyer wrote an excellent article on Forbes.com entitled “How Not To Lose Your Head When You Lose Your Data”.  As he notes, “PC users, almost without exception, are experienced with data loss.” This is an unfortunate reality of computing, but he does mention some important solutions.

If possible, the “goal should be disaster avoidance not disaster recovery”.  Creating a backup of your data can help avoid the stress of data loss in the unfortunate case of hard disk failure. The article suggests regular, automatic backups, such as our Unlimited Automatic Cloud Backup (now on sale for $14.99/mo).

Should you find yourself without a suitable backup, there are other options. You may be able to repair your failed hard drive and extract the data from it. (For advanced technicians we have a guide to PCB replacement and offer plenty of hard drive parts and PCB components for sale.)

If doing it yourself is a bit daunting or the failure is too severe, you can send it to a professional data recovery service, such as Outsource Data Recovery. They offer a $60 hard drive repair service, after which you can extract your own data. If this is not possible, they also offer full data recovery service – you can get a free instant quote by filling out some information on their website.

As the Forbes article says, in our computer-centric world, we all have data we would hate to lose—whether important business documents or priceless family photos—but we increasingly have options to protect or recover our lost data.