The Dangers of System Restore Discs

So as most of us have witnessed, most manufacturers of computers come with fancy ways to restore your computer back to its factory defaults as it shipped when you first got it. They can have small system partitions on your hard drive that contain the files needed to restore your computer back to the way it was when you first bought it. On other occasions, they will also send out the CD/DVD’s necessary to do the same thing. This is very handy for when you want to start out fresh again since sometimes a system can accumulate tons of stuff you no longer want and have no idea on how to get rid of it all.

Other times your system starts to get the famous blue screen of death while booting causing you to not be able to get into windows due to corrupted system files. System restores can fix this as well.

However, if the data on the drive is important and you do not want to lose it, DO NOT RUN A SYSTEM RESTORE. Do not let anyone else run a system restore or tell you to run a system restore. Even if you have a “tech” friend that says a system restore will fix it. Oh, it will fix the problem sometimes, but at the expense of losing your data.

The best thing to do when a drive fails is to get a data recovery company to do an evaluation on the drive first. Most companies do them for free. The data recovery company’s primary concern is to get your data back as safely as possible. Tech companies, most of the time just want to get your system back up and running again. That also goes for the computer manufactures tech support.

Be cautious if your data is important. You do not want to make it worse before you go to a data recovery company. You can make our job much harder. System restores overwrite data on your system, thus making it more difficult to get missing data back.

You never want to take risks when your data is on the line. There is no magic “go back” buttons for overwritten data. You may hear people say you can get back data from overwritten areas of the drive. They are wrong. Once it is overwritten, what was in that space is gone for good.

So the next time you system acts up and you are looking at the restore DVD or CD, put it down and think about the important data you have on your system you really want back and get it looked at by a professional data recovery company.