Use of DIY Data Recovery Software by Amateurs Carries its Own Risk

Data recovery and effective data backup procedures are the need of the hour. The data recovery market is booming now like never before because the value of data and the cost of losing data are too high.

DIY Data Recovery Software

If you have lost your valuable data and you want to recover it, you have two options - you can either opt for professional data recovery service or you can choose DIY data recovery software. Professional data recovery service usually guarantees successful results and consequently is a much safer data recovery option than DIY data recovery software.

Data recovery companies use specialised tools, techniques, and infrastructure to ensure that data recovery is successful. However, the specialised nature of this service makes the service extremely expensive. The field of data recovery is still in its nascent stage. As a result, there are very few companies that are truly specialised in this field and very less manual talent is available. Add to this the infrastructure costs of data recovery and what you have is an exorbitant bill that you will have to pay at the end of the data recovery process.

To avoid these high costs, most people tend to choose DIY data recovery software. DIY data recovery software is based on a pre-programmed code. This code attempts to incorporate solutions for all the common data recovery problems faced by the user. The software works by providing the user with multiple options during the data recovery process. The user is supposed to choose the option that best describes the data recovery problem.

Using DIY Data Recovery Software by Amateurs - Is it Worth it?

While using DIY data recovery is a cheap option, it may not always be the best one. As mentioned earlier, DIY data recovery software works by giving the user many options to choose from. The user needs to select the correct option each time the software prompts for description of the problem. If the user is not very familiar with the technical jargon used by the software, the user is bound to select an incorrect option.

If the user selects an incorrect option, it is highly likely that the data loss problem will become more severe. Therefore, using DIY data recovery software can convert a minor data loss problem into a major one. If your data is very valuable, the risk is not worth it.

In addition, no two data loss incidents can be the same. For example, while you may be encountering a data loss problem because of firmware corruption, it may or may not be accompanied by an electrical failure. It is not possible for any pre-programmed software to take into account all the data loss incidents and incorporate that within the program.

As amateur users may not be very knowledgeable about computers or electronic equipment in general, it is highly likely that they will not be able to identify the nature of the data loss problem. Therefore, they might think that a data loss problem is software-related while actually it might be hardware-related.

While DIY data recovery software may work for some of the software-related problems, they are rendered useless when you try to use them for hardware-related data loss issues. If an amateur user encountering a data loss problem due to hardware errors buys a data recovery software, he or she is bound to spend more money on data recovery because not only would the software not work for the problem but it may also aggravate the data loss situation even further. Therefore, the cost of professional data recovery will become more expensive than what it would have been initially.

Is There a Risk of Your Lost Data Being Inadvertently Overwritten upon?

It is not uncommon to hear of incidents wherein the users lose their data forever after using DIY data recovery software. This happens when the data recovery software overwrites on the existing data while attempting to recover the lost data. When the overwriting occurs repeatedly, the data is lost forever. Therefore, the user has to bear not only the cost of data recovery but also the cost of recreating the entire data. The latter may not always be possible because you may or may not have the adequate resources to recreate the data all over again.