Losing all data and files accidentally is really frustrating and humiliating. Everyone must have experienced this situation at least once. No matter, how carefully you are working on your system, there is always a chance of sudden data loss from your hard drive. There are several reasons for accidental loss of data such as power failure and hard drive failure.
Undoubtedly, external hard drives have a wide range of applications and are used by almost everyone for various purposes such as storing and transferring files or documents with great ease and speed. They offer numerous advantages but we also come across with several problems or issues at the same time.
Symptoms of hard drive failure
The hard drive can incur two types of failure namely logical failure and physical failure. In order to identify whether the hard drive is suffering from physical failure or logical failure, it is important to recognize the symptoms or error messages. Some common signs or symptoms of hard drive failure include:
- Hard drive crashes many times when booting up the system.
- Error messages occur while moving files or performing any other operations.
- Improper appearance of files and folders.
- Disappearing files and folders.
- Clicking sounds.
- Slow Access time.
In case, you detect any of such symptoms, you need to restore your data before any further damage takes place. Although data loss in an external drive cannot be avoided totally, however, we can take some steps to recover data from external drive.
Way to recover data from an external hard drive
There is a way to recover your data from an external hard drive easily. You can use free data recovery software to retrieve your data and files quickly. Have a look at the following steps.
- Search data recovery software available on the internet.
- Download and install it on your desktop or laptop.
- Connect your external hard drive to your system.
- Right click on the data recovery software and choose the Run as Administrator option to launch it as an administrator.
- After this, pick the file types that you want to recover from your drive.
- Click on “Next” button in order to progress to the next step of the process.
- Right click on the external drive and press Scan button.
- On pressing the Scan button, the software will find all the target files for recovery.
- After scanning, preview all the listed recoverable files to choose the files that you want to get back.
- Click on the “Recover” option to recover all your files once again.
- Save your recovered files on another drive.
In case of a mechanical or physical failure, if you are not sure about what to do with your hard drive, it is recommended to turn off your external hard drive and take it to an experienced professional. It is a wise idea to consult a specialist rather than doing it yourself as a small negligence may result in further damage or permanent loss of data.
