After you’ve finally recovered from shock of your hard drive crash, you’ll have to begin process of recovering your files. It’s not a fun task, but somebody has to do it. You can pay a lot of money to hire expertise, or you can do it yourself using software made especially for this type of situation. Take a bit of comfort knowing that if there’s software to handle this situation, you’re not alone in needing it! It’s important to understand that there are different levels of corruption that can occur on your computer.
You can have a complete hard drive failure which will disintegrate everything installed on your system. Then there is individual file corruption which can still ruin your day.
When an individual file is corrupted, it means that program that manages file is unable to access it. Without access, file becomes corrupted. There are many ways a file can become corrupted.
There might be a bad spot on your hard drive that file attempted to write to. There are diagnostic programs you can run periodically to fix these bad spots, but most small business owners just don’t do that. If bad spots are not fixed, and file gets written to it or partially written to it, that file is officially corrupted. (However, you probably won’t know this until next time you go to open that file!)
Power surges are another big culprit involved in corrupting files. If a power surge strikes at moment you are attempting to open a file, close a file or write to a file, file will become corrupted.
Accidentally kicking big, red power switch on your CPU likely will corrupt whatever files were open at that time. Viruses are notorious for wreaking havoc on your files as are any number of other unexpected and unexplainable gremlins that attach to your pc on a daily basis.