We want to give you some good advice so you will need us less often. And when you desperately need us you will have a good chance of recovering what seems to be lost forever. So here is a list of things you can do (or avoid) to minimize data loss:

1. Make regular backups of your data
   The best prevention for data loss.
2. Cool your hard drive
   This is not so trivial, yet our experience shows that one of the main reasons of physical damage is heat. Mechanical parts (mainly heads) may overheat and malfunction as a result.
3. Use redundant storage (RAID)
   Effective protection against hardware failure.
4. Use UPS's
   Even a short loss of power may affect the firmware of drives and resut in power spikes that may damage electrical parts.
5. Surge protect your devices
   This goes hand in hand with the previous problem and may be applied simultaneously.
6. When data is lost
   When you experince data loss, immediately turn off the computer. Mounting a malfunctioning drive under an operating system may render the operating system and - if the media is still accessible - even file system information useless. This is especially true of trying to use Scandisk. (We discourage the use of Scandisk as it is not a data recovery tool.) If your data is important to you please call an expert as experimentation tends to adversely affect recovery.