Mac Recovery
As Macs continue to gain popularity, especially among college students and the tech-savvy crowd, the incidence of data loss
increases as well. Although Macs recover gracefully from many types of errors and crashes that plague the PC crowd,
Macs are more notorious for the difficulty of data recovery. If you accidentally delete or overwrite a file, or if the hard drive fails,
you should immediately shut down your Mac and contact a data recovery expert.
Why is Mac Data Recovery So Difficult?
Macs have their own unique way of storing data on the computer. You may be aware that Macs use the HFS+ filesystem. Whereas most filesystems treat files as a single
chunk of data, files are split into two parts on HFS+. One part (the data fork) represents the contents of the file itself, and the other part (the resource fork)
is often used to store style information, icons, images, help text, and other information.
These parts of the file often become separated. You may have noticed this occasionally when copying a word document from a Mac to a PC, only to discover that
images and fonts in the copied file are missing.
Recovering data on a Mac hard drive requires finding both parts of each file, which often become separated.
Macs gained their widespread popularity only recently, and finding a data recovery technician who is experienced in Mac data recovery is more difficult – but crucial for
successful data recovery!
Trying the Recovery on Your Own
Trying to do the Mac data recovery on your own is a difficult and dangerous procedure. You can try it – as long as you are absolutely sure of what you’re doing and aware of
all the risks.
One of the greatest ironies in data recovery is that people’s good intentions work against them. Downloading and installing data recovery software, pulling out the
hard drive and tinkering with it, letting other family members and friends take a shot – all of these will lower your chances of recovering your data.
The more you do to the hard drive, the less likely all of your data will be recovered.
You have to keep in mind that you must prevent any data whatsoever from being written to the hard drive. This can be a little tricky. Most operating systems will save
data to the hard drive when you power on the machine. Sometimes, you can see this for yourself: for example, when you attach an external hard drive or a USB flash drive
on Windows, you often see a temporary file appear on the drive.
As you can see, the risk of overwriting data is very high, even when you are doing something as innocuous as attaching the hard drive to another computer. If you
do not feel comfortable with risking losing your data forever, you should refer to a data recovery professional.
What You Should Do When You Lose Data
Most importantly, you must minimize your hard drive usage. You should avoid doing anything that would trigger the operating system to write data to the hard drive
because you might overwrite the data you want to retrieve. For example, do not download or install anything, for obvious reasons: you are storing a tremendous amount
of new data on your hard drive, both during the download, and during the installation! You should also avoid saving any new files, browsing the web, or using multimedia
(or any memory-intensive) applications.
The best thing you can do to preserve your lost data is to shut down your computer and find a data recovery professional.
There are very few Mac data recovery companies in the California area. I would recommend that you go with
DataRecovery-Sacramento.com. They will give you a free quote, and if you bring your Mac in, they will assess it for
free and tell you how much of your lost data they will be able to recover. If you are a University student or a faculty member, don’t forget to mention it because you
are eligible for a discount. If you are in California, DataRecovery-Sacramento.com is your best choice for Mac data recovery
Data Recovery Services Offered: