We may not expect it to ever happen but sometimes hard drives can get wet from flooding in a home or office and the data will need to be recovered if possible. Hurricane Katrina is an example where flooding was not expected yet it happened and data was lost on many levels. While this is not nearly as important as loss of life, what about a minor flood in your home or business that hurts no one but trashes your hard drive? There are a few guidelines to consider so that you don’t further damage your precious data and information.
Leave it to the professionals. Many Disklabs have recovered data from flooded hard drives and if you try to do it yourself you can potentially damage the hard drive even more; losing data that could have been retrieved professionally. If you try to do it yourself, you can hinder the Disklab being able to get data that they could have gotten prior to your handling of the hard drive.
Don’t attempt to dry out the hard drive yourself. This seems like something you would want to do but it’s not because the heads of the hard drive will be stuck to the platters and drying it out can damage these platters making data recovery unable to be performed. Again, leave it to the guys that know what they are doing so place it in a plastic bag in order to keep it wet; just as it already is. Keeping it wet allows it to keep from corroding and further damaging your important data. The professionals will be able to clean it and dry it out their way, which is safest so that you have a better chance of not losing anything.
Most importantly, don’t panic and just let the pros take over and attempt to get your data back safe and sound.