Working with large quantities of information? You know the desperate moment when you realize that you need some files that you deleted a long time ago. This is the topic of this post : Recycle bin data recovery. First lets start with some general data recovery tips, valid for all type of data devices, PC’s, Mac’s, phones.

These days, it’s perfectly viable to do just about anything in the browser. You can write documents and edit Excel spreadsheets in Google Docs and the online version of Microsoft Office, Office 365, use Dropbox or OneDrive to organize your files, edit photos in Pixlr, and much more. Because the work you do using these online apps is stored in the cloud and backed by industry-grade data backup solutions, there’s virtually zero chance of you ever losing your progress. If you can build your entire workflow around online apps, you don’t even need to bring a laptop with you when traveling. Any public computer will allow to continue right from where you left off.

The first step is to remove the hard drive from the device if possible, or otherwise stop using it. Any actions, even installing a recovery app, risks overwriting the files you need. The good news is that when you delete a file on a drive, all that data doesn’t immediately go away. The computer mostly erases the information that points the computer to that chunk of data, which will remain until it gets written over. This works differently depending on whether you have a magnetic spinning disk drive or a solid-state drive (SSD), which you’ll find on most modern computers. But either way, recovery is possible.

Is the drive making a beeping sound on powering up? This is an indication of a mechanical failure. Either the drive is suffering from stiction (read/write heads of the drive parking over the data area of the platter instead of their dedicated ramp when not in use) or a seizure of the motor spindle around which the platters rotate (this can happen due to dropping of the drive). Both these failures need the drive to be opened and thus need it to be sent to a data recovery service center.

Platters: Your drive contains one or more thin, circular platters. These spin around at anywhere between 5,900rpm to 7,200rpm on consumer drives and are the media that actually store your data. Made of glass or some form of alloy and coated with a magnetic layer, they can store anything up to 4TB of data. Head assembly: Data from your drives’ platters is read by means of a series of read and write heads. While in operation, these heads are not actually in contact with the surface of the platters. In fact, they ‘fly’ nanometers above the surface of the disk, reading and writing data. Typically a drive will have 2 heads per platter, so a large capacity drive with 3 platters will be paired up with 6 heads, one for each side of each platter. If these heads fail physically or the drive is dropped or knocked over, the drive can experience a ‘head crash’ where the heads no longer fly over the platters, but instead make contact with the surface and destroy your data at a few thousand revolutions per minute.

Recovery services are also the only viable option if the machine was exposed to water, or if it was dropped and it’s likely some part of the drive was broken. If you hear loud clicking noises, or the machine was immersed in liquid, then the best route is to turn it off and keep it off. Never use a hairdryer or other hot air on the machine as this can push the liquid into further components and create an environment of high humidity. Simply find a recovery service and let the experts handle it. There are hundreds of software utility tools that can be downloaded off the internet for free, and offer promises of fast and easy data retrieval. Unfortunately, many of these are filled with malware, and using them will expose the data to theft or worse. Avoid using free utility services that do not have an established reputation as effective and virus-free tools.

DoYourData can help you easily recover deleted, formatted or lost files from WD Elements portable hard drive including WD Elements 500GB, WD Elements 750GB, WD Elements 1TB, WD Elements 1.5TB, WD Elements 2TB etc. DoYourData also can recover lost data from other kind of devices, such as hard drive, USB drive, Memory card, SD card etc. Read extra details at Western Digital hard drive data recovery.