But what if one day, when trying to boot your computer, it simply doesn't work? It doesn't seem to be able to "see" your hdd and anything else for that matter. Like any other mechanism, a computer needs all its' parts in good shape to be able to function properly. Unfortunately, you know that all your work was on that hard drive. Work which you forgot to save on a cd or dvd. That would have been a good idea, but now what?

It's easy in theory. You call a disk recovery company. First of all, you need to search the internet for available disk recovery companies in your area. They have to be in your area, because you need to provide them with the hardware. When you make the phone call, you will be asked a few questions, and remember, you will probably need to provide some technical details.

The first one would be the model of your hard disk drive. You need to take a look at it and see the label of the company which produced it, as well as the model. If you knew how to extract it from your computer, you will surely know that. If one of your friends did it though, just take a look at it or check the documentations which came with the computer.

Then, you will have to tell the company's disk recovery assistant the name of the operating system you were using. Your operating system's name is what appears when your computer boots.

Finally, you will need to provide the names and types of the files that you desperately want recovered. Each file has, apart from a name, an extension too. For example, text files created with notepad have the .txt extension. If you are working with the almighty program created by the company responsible for the operating system, those files have .doc extension. But these are just some basic examples.

When you provide the company with your hard drive, an evaluation is made which will tell you the amount of damage your hard drive has sustained. Taking that into consideration, a price is set for the service of recovering your losses.

Without getting into more technical details, it must be said that having your data recovered can be a life saver. You could have worked for months or even years at what you lost. Though, I must advise you, when all your work is centered around one computer, you really need to create back-up option.

Imagine the first scenario (the one in which you lose all your data) and a scenario in which you simply take a cd or dvd from your drawer. The miraculous cd has all your work, because you've been very cautious and you've been saving your work from time to time, let's say one a week. Now, tell me, isn't that the best disk recovery method?