10 Steps to Avoiding PC Disasters: Day 5
Day 5: Repairing Corrupted Files:
Nothing bites worse than working on reports, data etc. in a program like Word or Excel and after diligently saving your files while you worked on them, opening them up later and seeing nothing but a confusing string of illegible rectangles in place of your valuable data! Data corruption usually seems to occur at the worst times, and it can happen even now that Microsoft has included data recovery tools with their latest versions of their programs.
Corrupted files are a pain, because you usually cannot access a backup, but have to try and repair the corruption. Corruption of data is often caused by the media used to store your data on (hard drives, floppies, optical disks, etc.). There may be a scratch on your disk or bad sectors on your hard drive when yuo save your data, resulting in a corruption.
It only takes a small amount of corruption to damage your entire file and render it useless. Many corrupt files can be recovered however, in whole are part, by using corrupted data recovery software like Ontrack Easy Recovery. It points out one of the simplest yet most effective ways to recover corrupted data and files: opening the file as a plain test document. While some formatting characters and images won’t be recovered or displayed in the plain text format, it is possible to recover sizeable amounts of text this way.
Once you open your file and copy the text, you can then paste that back into your main program (ie, Word) and then restore the formatting you had before. This might take a while if you had a large document or file initially, but at least you don’t have to start from scratch again!
Make sure after you have experienced a corrupt file that you run a full disk check (if the file that was corrupted was stored on your hard drive). This will make sure any bad sectors are marked and not used again for the storage of any future data you save.
To run a disk scan, right-click the drive icon in My Computer and then choose Properties > Tools > Check Now, and choose “Automatically Fix File-System Errors”. Also select the “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” option, and then click ok and be prepared to restart your PC for the scan to start.
Note: Another Very useful program that will fix any windows registry corruptions (which could lead to PC errors and data corruptions) is RegCure registry cleaner. Give the Free scan a try today and save yourself from suffering through any more data corruptions!