heres some other things that may come handy
1) use backup software i recommend super flexible file synchronizer & genie backup manager , its best to backup to another hard drive and not to another partition on same hard drive cuz if your backing up to another partition on same hard drive if it will die its all gone
2) never do defrag or put/install new files to the partition you wanna recover data from also when recovering do not save the data to the same partition it was recovered from and if the data you wanna recover is on the operating system partition turn pc off and plug the hard drive to another pc (that have another hard drive with os) various softwares create temp files on the os partition so putin in another pc for recovery purposes is best unless the data recovery software is able to create a bootable floppy or cd , those temp files may overwrite the data you wanna recover
3) the best data recovery softwares are data rescue pc & easy recovery pro but the price of erp is just insane