Before data recovery, it is suggested to clone the failed hard drive, namely creating an image file of the drive, as the drive image will be pretty beneficial. Some users may feel suspicious. Now, in this article, we will expose the reasons in detail.
As we all know, all of the computer data is actually stored in the computer hard drive. Thus, once the hard drive failed, the computer data will surely be in danger as well. Without any doubts, no one can accept the hard drive failures. However, it is seemingly inevitable that hard drive can malfunction due to various factors such as wear and tear, physical damages, and software issues, etc.
Therefore, in order to prevent data loss on the hard drive, you should back up the drive data at regular intervals, in that data backups will help a lot in future, such as easily restoring corrupt Outlook data from backups after Outlook damage. But, if you have no any effective data backups, what you have to meet up with is data recovery. At that point, the first step in data recovery should be making an image of the hard drive. Unfortunately, quantities of users neglect this vital step. Now, we will reveal the significance of cloning the hard drive before data recovery.
1. Prevent Further Damage to Original Hard Drive
When your hard drive becomes corrupt or physically damaged, every improper operation on the drive can make great influences. For instance, perhaps you have no professional knowledge about the hard drive data recovery. In this case, if you perform any incorrect actions on the drive, like using unreliable recovery tools to attempt DIY recovery, etc., the hard drive can suffer further damage. Thus, with a disk image, you can perform recovery on the image file rather than the original drive, so that you can prevent any further degradation or data loss on the drive.
2. Reading Image Is Faster than Reading Failed Drive
In addition, during data recovery, you will definitely be required to read the data of the hard drive. At this time, reading an image can be much faster than trying to read the failed hard drive. The faulty drive may contain multiple bad sectors that cannot be reached and read as normal. Therefore, in recovery, your computer will stumble when meeting any bad sectors. Nevertheless, the image file created from the hard drive will not clone the bad sectors. Therefore, without any bad sectors, reading data on the disk image is far quicker.
3. Drive Image Is More Portable
It’s known that hard drive is vulnerable to physical damage. Hence, under normal circumstances, you should take good care of your hard drive, like never knocking it. That is to say, if your hard drive has corrupted, you had better not move it greatly. Otherwise, the drive can crash thoroughly. From this perspective, a drive image is much more portable. You can transfer it from one device to another and deliver it to data recovery service at will. It’s much convenient.
4. Increase Chances for Successful Data Recovery
Based on all the mentioned above, it is apparent that the chance for data recovery on the drive image is much higher than normal. For example, if your hard drive is encountering physical defects, such as read/write arm failure, each time you read or write to a drive sector, your drive will damage further. At that time, the odds of successful data recovery will be destroyed totally. Also, with disk image, you have two opportunities to attempt data recovery. In a nutshell, to facilitate drive data recovery, you had better make an image for it.
Author Introduction:
Shirley Zhang is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including corrupted mdf and outlook repair software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com