Are you a victim of accidental data deletion? Have you lost your valuable data due to a bout of malicious virus attack, power failure, or a hard drive crash? Don’t worry. Millions of computer users in the world suffer from unintentional data losses. While you can prevent accidental data loss through investments in hardware and data rescue tools, there are some free tools as well. These tools may not be as perfect as their commercial counterparts, but they do a decent job. In this article, we will explore some of these free data recovery tools and their modus operandi.

How they work

Remember this backdrop behind file deletion. Whenever your files are deleted, the data still resides on the hard drive. The only thing is that the operating system marks this space in the hard drive as free space. Your computer can write new data over that space. If you apply a data recovery tool prior to this writing, the data recovery process is likely to be easier. In case you format the drive, then the job will be much more difficult for the data recovery tool.

Let us now discuss about a few free data recovery tools. TestDisk is Open Source data rescue software that is licensed under the GNU General Public License. It is a highly powerful free data recovery tool. The tool was primarily designed to help recover lost hard drive partitions and to make non-booting disks bootable again. The tool can provide protection to data loss from viruses, faulty software installation, and accidental deletion. With TestDisk, you can easily recover lost partition tables. Following are some of the activities that TestDisk can easily accomplish the following:
•    Fix deleted partition table
•    Recover and rebuild FAT32 boot sector from the backup
•    Fix FAT tables
•    Recover and rebuild NTFS boot sector
•    Use MFT mirror to fix MFT
•    Undelete files from FAT, NTFS, and ext 2 file system
•    Copy files from deleted FAT and NTFS partitions

TestDisk is highly user-friendly. It has features that suit both novices and experts. TestDisk has features that can collect the necessary information from people who don’t know much about data rescue. People familiar with data recovery concepts will find the tool even more helpful for onsite data recovery. The tool can run under the following OS platforms:
•    DOS
•    Windows (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista)
•    Linux
•    FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
•    Sun operating system
•    Mac operating system

If you are that kind of person who thinks “it won’t happen to me”, then you are about to commit a big mistake. Like many other aspects of life, the “it won’t happen to me” attitude might bring disaster to your data. Not only your business data, but also the data that resides on your home PC or laptop is valuable too. You might suffer a great emotional loss if your favorite pictures are lost, or the thesis that you are about to complete vanishes rapidly from your drive, leaving you dumbfound. There are several things that can take away your valuable data – power outage, hard drive crash, accidental deletion beyond the recycle bin, computer virus attack, faulty installation of software etc.

The frequency of the backup will vary from case to case. If you are the user of corporate data, then that data needs to be backed up more frequently. For a home user, the frequency will be less. Remember that backing up data involves cost. You have to chalk out an efficient backup strategy to make optimum utilization of your resources. The most widely circulated thumb rule is to backup those data that would be difficult to recreate.

For small scale backup activities, you might think of burning DVDs or CDs. These two tools are both economical and handy. Most computers are equipped with optical burners that burn data into these optical disks.

Depending on your need, you can implement a system that can backup data all the time. You have to spend some money and time to establish such a system. You need to look beyond the optical disk burners – look at some hardware installation. The most common solution is to fit in an external drive. This will eliminate the need for manual backups, labeling and filing.

For office data, you might need to backup data across an entire network. Naturally, this will shoot up your backup costs. You have to install a high capacity Network Attached Storage (NAS) box to enable everyone in the local network to back up their data.
Multi-disk NAS boxes are available in the market that provide Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) functionality. If one drive goes down, you will be able to reconstruct your files from those disks that remain.