Lost data? Don't panic. Panic only blurs your vision !

We mean this quite seriously. 

The more important your data, the slower you should proceed. Everything that you do on a disk drive can potentially overwrite something important. Once overwritten, it's gone. Even restarting the computer flushes all caches and writes temporary files. If you have erased something by mistake, just pull the plug. (Something erased is internally seen as available space. The more activity - even an orderly shutdown - the more chances to overwrite the raw sectors which still contain your data.)

We have seen too many cases where a minor problem with a disk drive has turned into a major one: Anyone who finds their work vanished will naturally try everything that they can think of. Then, they will usually borrow and try every tool that their friends can suggest. Unfortunately, they will generally make things worse at every iteration. 

We know it is difficult but please stop, take a deep breath, make yourself a tea, go for a short walk. Do whatever you need to do to get a bigger picture about where you are at and what is the best next step. If you are unsure, talk to whomever you trust. Of course, we would recommend that you talk to us: we have many years of experience facing this kind of problems on a daily basis. At the same time, we do appreciate that we could be perceived as biased. The best we can say is that to stay in business all these years, we made a very early decision to avoid short-term gains wich carry a long-term pain: We want you to recommend us to your friends once that today's catastrophe has become a distant memory and that you can laugh about it.

Yes, everybody and their dog has an opinion about computers, files, how it all works and what to do next. May we respectfully suggest that you take it all with a grain of salt? We already know all the "old wife's" tales - hitting it, freezing it, heating it, turning it upside down and... There are even rare situations where these may work. Unfortunately, chances are that they will kill your last chance of getting your precious data. In particular, be extremely weary of tools that offer to "repair" your disk (as opposed to extract the information from it, leaving it untouched). To repair, they will have to write to it, which means overwriting something else - generally in the directory. Don't. If anything is attempted, it should be only done on a clone, not on the original disk.

At the end of the day, you are going to have to make some decisions. The best way to make those decisions is with as much real, solid information as you can get. This is one area where experience is essential. Talk to as many people with real knowledge as you can. In addition to whomever else you find, talk to us. Call 1300 88 31 77 (local call charge in Australia) and ask to speak to an engineer. We promise that it will be worth your while, irrelevant from whether you ultimately choose us for the job or not. If it's something straight forward, we normally try and help you sort it on the phone - it's less paperwork for us ;-)