Dos and Don'ts when a hard drive gets wet

In the past couple of years, USA has seen a number of hurricanes and floods. Natures furry seems to be unleashing itself every now and then, and destroying not only lives and houses but the hard work of many. Forget the hurricanes and floods, your own house is no less of a threat to data stored on storage devices!!! It's a common situation many of us seem to face in our day to day lives--coffee falling on our computer, the laptop falling into water, etc etc.

For most of us today, computers and laptops have become probably the most vital machines in our lives!! If your car gets damaged you can buy a new one. If your laptop gets damaged, you can again buy a new one, but what about the data that was on it?? You can't possibly buy that, can you? This data can be salvaged with the help of data recovery services.

For example, if your laptop falls in the water after a rain. Here are some simple dos and don'ts that would help you salvage data from the drive:

DON'TS:

DO NOT TURN ON THE SYSTEM: The most common mistake people make is to try and turn on the drive. This further damages the drive. The reason is that when you dry out a drive, all the residue present in the water, damages the drive further and makes it very difficult to salvage data from the drive.
DO NOT DRY THE HARD DRIVE: The first thing anyone would think of doing to something that got wet by mistake, is to open it up and dry it. This however is not the right thing to do in case of hard drives, reason being that water contains sediments. When you dry out the hard drive, these particles stick to and damage the sensitive components of the drive.
DO NOT CLEAN IT YOURSELF: Never try and clean the drive yourself especially with household cleaning appliances. This could only lead to more complications and could cause you to lose your data for good!!

DOS:

REMOVE THE DRIVE FROM THE WATER ASAP: Ensure to remove the system from the water as soon as it falls in. This could reduce the damage done to it.
TAKE OUT THE HARD DISK FROM THE SYSTEM: Take out the hard drive from the CPU and wrap it in an air tight bag immediately after.
CONTACT A DATA RECOVERY SERVICE: They have helplines and technicians who perform data recovery from damaged hard drives. Hard drive recovery services have clean rooms where they perform data recovery and this is the only place where a hard drive should be opened (in order to ensure that no further damage occurs to the same).

Stellar Data Recovery Services, NJ, which follows a "No Data, No Charge" policy, is a well reputed and recognized company in the field. They are able to perform data recovery from any kind of damaged hard drives (damaged due to natural disasters like fire, water etc, due to virus attacks etc).

Article By Shaun Pattrik