Working with big amounts 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 subject of this article : Recover deleted files which were deleted long time ago. First lets start with some general data recovery tricks, valid for all type of data devices, PC’s, Mac’s, phones.

Use cloud storage. For most regular users, cloud storage services represent the most reliable way how to protect themselves against data loss. Providers of these services are commonly located on the other side of the planet, and they use sophisticated backup systems at their storage facilities, resulting in multiple degrees of redundancy. Best of all, services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive have free plans with generous storage limits, which are more than enough for text documents.

Most recovery apps start as a free trial, then will charge you if a scan indicates that it can likely recover your files. Sounds like extortion, but the idea is that we’d be even more mad if we paid for the service, then it told us that it couldn’t work. EaseUS and Recuva both come recommended, and we’ve tested and can vouch for Prosoft Data Rescue and Ontrack (see below). These apps scan the affected drives (or USB sticks, whatever) and let you search for whatever you’re missing by file type, name, etc. They’ll also show you recently deleted files, and tell you how recoverable they are. The process is as intuitive as any modern app, though the results are never guaranteed.

Is the drive sounding normal but is not detected or detected with the wrong capacity? This indicates a problem with some area of the firmware. For drives manufactured a few years back, there was a DIY solution for it. However, modern drives with this problem need to be sent to a data recovery service center to be repaired.

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.

Older laptops that were constructed with traditional hard drives were fairly simple to pop open and fix. You could unscrew a few screws holding the case together, and then plug into the drive via an universal SATA port to retrieve the data. Opening the actual drive itself is not without risk, or advisable, as dust could and will enter the drive, causing contamination and potentially additional damage during the process. For example, older drives would be subject to something called stiction, and sometimes became ‘stuck’, whereby the head and actuator were locked or stuck and the motor failed to spin, causing the hard drive platters to spin improperly. One trick that had some reported success involved placing a hard drive in the freezer, which would cause the metal to contract and become unstuck, at least long enough to offload the data.

DoYourData file recovery software is one of the most powerful data recovery software that can help users recover lost data from hard drive and storage media. It is fully capable of recovering deleted or lost files from WD Elements portable hard drive. It offers both quick scan and deep scan mode to scan your WD Elements portable hard drive to find every recoverable file. Follow the steps to recover your WD Elements device data using DoYourData. Read more details at Recover lost files from WD Elements portable hard drive.