In the event of a hard drive failure, the best recovery will always be a good backup. However, lacking a good backup, the next step would be to attempt recovering the files that would have been lost due to the hard drive failure.

Once you have cleaned up your computer from malicious software such as viruses, spyware and adware and have cleaned up the "garbage" floating on your computer, it is time to back it up. Why? Because your hard drive will eventually fail and you'd be a lot happier if you could restore from a backup copy rather than have to create everything from scratch. You're going to have to trust me on this, as I have been through it myself... more than once!

	Acronis True Image 10 is one of the best backup utilities that I have used to date.  I utilized Ghost since version 1.1 until about 2003 when I discovered True Image 7.  The product is not only easier to use, but more reliable when attempting to recover your failed system. Additionally, you can create an image of your hard drive either within Windows itself based on a schedule that you determine, or from a bootable CD. You can save to an internal hard drive, a locally attached USB hard drive, a drive connected to another machine via your network, or even an FTP Site. For $49.95 (Retail) [$39.99 Average Street Price] per single-user license, it is definitely an insurance policy worth having.
	In the event that you have not backed up your system for a considerable amount of time, all may not have been lost. Although the $499.00 price tag may seem shocking, it is a lot less than the $2000.00 or higher price-tag that I have seen for professional drive recovery. This software is the best do-it-yourself data recovery software that I have ever seen.
	If you need to recover individual files that were accidentally deleted, then Panda Recovery just might be the tool you need.  Besides being very powerful, it's free for private use.