It happens to everyone. Data loss. You deleted last week's TPS report because you thought it was an old revision. Your hard drive was corrupted. You formatted that memory card. Whatever the cause, any of these situations is equally bad. On top of it all, it's the middle of the billing cycle and you just don't have the funds budgeted to send the media out for restoration, and you don't have the cash on hand to pay for some expensive recovery software. Where do you turn? Freeware file recovery software.

Here's what free data recovery software can do:

• Save you money
• Recovery inadvertently deleted files
• Rescue files from data corruption
• Sometimes recover from a format or partition change

Here's what free data recovery software can't do:

• Repair hardware damage
• Recovery files from physically damaged media
• Provide a consultation before it goes to work
• Give you a guarantee

You should have your data recovery software already downloaded, and you should be familiar with its operation. Trying to learn how to use it during the stress of a data loss probably isn't the best idea. Make it part of your disaster recovery plan.

If you have Microsoft Windows based computers in your operation, you should make sure that the recovery software will understand FAT, FAT32, and NTFS file systems. These three systems are the formats in use by Windows based computers. Also make sure that your software will understand and recover file and directory names that begin with non-standard characters, such as the euro symbol. Logging what it does is also very important so that you can go back and review if something has gone wrong.

Data loss and recovery are situations that no-one ever wants to deal with; however, it will eventually happen to you. Data loss or corruption can hit your company hard, no matter its size, and if the damage is to a major file server, it may cost into the tens of thousands of dollars and the recovery will have to be done by a specialized service. But if it's a simple data loss due to user error, there is generally a freeware solution available which will get your data back. A do it yourself solution is both timely and cost effective.