Strategies of Floppy Data Recovery

Most new machines come shipped in a configuration that omits one of the most common devices from the last two decades, the three and a half inch floppy drive. In fact, most of the big computer manufacturers tend to treat this little nugget as obsolete. With the relative cheapness of cd-recordable and re-writable media, and the ready availability of inexpensive flash media, the floppy drive IS on the way out. But many users still have them, and still use them for a variety of reasons, including portability and backup.

Floppy disks are notoriously fragile. You have a disk you've been using for a while, and all of a sudden it just becomes unreadable. What's worse is that you don't have a more current version of the data that's on the disk. You have to have it back. After the previous articles, you have a pretty fair understanding of hard disk data recovery, but this floppy situation is worrying. Most data recovery companies can in fact recover your disk based data, so the situation isn't that bad.

Here are some simple guidelines to give you the best chance of salvaging the data from that floppy:

• Write protect your disk immediately. This will help to insure that you don't overwrite that data on the disk, and ruin the chances of recovery.
• Contact a professional data recovery service, using some of the same guidelines that I have written about earlier. Make sure you get a quote, check the guarantee, etc.

Data loss stemming from the failure of a floppy disk can be just as bad as losing an entire hard drive, depending on the contents of the disk. Remember that a floppy disk is quite fragile. However, if the physical damage to the floppy isn't too bad, a data recovery professional should be able to have your data back to you in less than a week, which is far better than never getting it at all.