The first thing to do is to do a search of your folders to make sure you have not saved it in the incorrect folder and if this does not fine the elusive file you can also try having a look in the recycle bin to make sure you have not accidently deleted it. If the file can still not be found then this may be indicative that you are suffering from a degraded drive.

Much as we would like to believe a hard drive will not last forever but has a definitive life expectancy which is often referred to as a mean time between failures (MTB). MTB can often be used as a reference to a drive future reliability and calculations would put expected drive failures at less than 0.1 percent.

But oh if life was so simple!

So the big question is when is the best time to renew my hard drive so it does not suffer from any failures?

This is a very difficult question to answer and also opens up a whole host of other factors that need to be taken into consideration as well.

The first major aspect is of course the use that a computer is put through during its lifespan. Many home users only use their Pc very occasionally and store relatively small numbers of files or photos. In this scenario it would be nice to expect a drive to last over 5 years (don’t assume this though).

The same expectation could be applied to the many mid range computer users which includes office Pc’s laptops and home desktop systems, where users have a small number of programs in use and small amounts of data or if data is stored on a central server.

But for power users it is an entirely different story. Extreme gamers and users of high end commercial applications will be driving their systems very hard indeed and the amount of data that is shifted into swap files or written back to the disk is huge so its only reasonable to expect disk life to be shorter and the chances of drive failure or disk degradation to be far higher.

High end computer users using high end applications will often have a much shorter expected life of their system, and desktop refresh tends to be around 3 years or so to avoid disk failure and to keep them at the cutting edge of computing productivity which is important for a business.

For business critical applications extended use sees a ramp up of hard disk degradation and also an increase in mechanical drive failures.

The time between desktop refreshes is often stretched during difficult economic climates but this is not without the greater risk of critical data loss due to failed or degraded drives especially where there is no disaster recovery plan in place.

Any business should in this day and age have effective online server backup and disaster recovery policies in place especially if postponing a business system upgrade.

Another prime factor affecting the longevity of the drive is of course disk maintenance. If your hard drive is allowed to become fragmented then it will have to work an awful lot harder to pick up information and in extreme cases of hard disk fragmentation drives can get very stressed to the point of failure.

Your lost file should be easily recoverable but you do need to bear in mind that any further information written to your hard drive can over write the file you are trying to save. This often happens with data recovery software so if diy recovery is your choice be warned.

Most data recovery services will be able to restore your deleted or lost files even if your drive has degraded and even if your drive has bad sectors that are unreadable data recovery and file recovery are often very successful.