How to Recover Family Photos After Your Data is Damaged

A massive hurricane has engulfed large parts of North Carolina. Hurricane Florence is one of the worst disasters in our lifetimes. Unfortunately, large disasters like this hurricane are not out of the ordinary. There is an average of 22 major natural disasters in the United States every year. When you break it down, this means that there is going to be a massive disaster around once every other week. These disasters also seem to be occurring more frequently these days, which some experts attribute to global warming.

Many of these disasters cause a lot of havoc to the communities that they strike. Of course, the most devastating situation is when people lose their lives or their homes after disaster strikes. Fortunately, most families don’t experience such horrific tragedies. Nonetheless, they often lose valuable data from their personal computers or mobile devices, even if the rest of their home is left intact. The files they lose could be work related. However, a lot of them are family photos from vacations, weddings and other precious events. These photos are priceless, so it can be heartbreaking if they are lost.

There are a number of reasons that families often lose valuable photos during a hurricane or other disaster:

• Electrical storms or power outages can cause damage to computers that were plugged in at the time.
• Excessive condensation from flooding can dampen the hard drive and the moisture can contaminate the data.
• Computers may be knocked over from an earthquake or people frantically trying to evacuate or do an emergency recovery.

If a hard drive is damaged during a natural disaster, a lot of precious files may be lost. The good news is that there are a number of things that you can do before and after disaster strikes to preserve your precious family photos and other valuable files. Here are some tips that will help you avoid losing your valuable memories during a disaster.

Save important files to the cloud

There are a number of cloud hosting services that are completely free. There are others that charge a fee, but they also offer better protection and privacy settings in return.

Google Drive and DropBox are great cloud storage solutions for desktop users. You can store a lot of data on both of these services without paying a lot. If you are trying to protect files on your Apple mobile device, you can look into using iCloud. This cloud storage service comes with your iPhone.

The great thing about backing up files on the cloud is that the servers are located all over the world. Unless there was a major global electrical storm or something, then your files will be recovered.

Use a dependable data recovery solution

Even after your hard drive is damaged, you can often recover files that were stored on it. There are a number of data recovery solutions on the market. Some of them are better equipped for restoring corrupted or damaged files, such as R-Undelete Software. Make sure you use a higher quality data recovery application if any of your valuable family files have been ruined.

This option will hopefully be a last resort. If you backed your files up properly, then you will be able to

Keep track of your most valuable files

Most families accumulate hundreds of photos, videos and other files over the years. However, some of them are going to be more important than others. It is a good idea to regularly go through all of your files and make a list of important family photos and other files that you can’t afford to lose.

Your most valuable files are the ones that you need to make a point to backup.

Consider using an automated backup service

Some services will automatically back up your files as soon as they are stored on your device. This minimizes the need to back each of them up individually. Of course, if you have a limited storage capacity on your back up drives, then you may not want to use this option by default. You can always choose to go through them later and delete ones that aren’t as important.

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