Data Recovery

Approach to recoup stored data on damaged media such as hard disk, RAID array, Tape drive when it is not achievable to work on that data in general is known as data recovery.

Data Recovery Techniques

There are many data recovery companies worldwide which are providing data recovery services to their clients. These data recovery companies use a variety of techniques in order to recover data for their customers. We can sum up these data recovery techniques into two main categories:

Logical Data Recovery

The data recovery companies more likely to adopt this technique if the damage is logical. They operate the media on a working computer system using some data recovery software to rebuild damaged data files for their patrons.

Physical Data Recovery

This technique is being used in case of physical damage of storage media. In this technique the physically damaged parts usually the platters of the media is detached from damaged media and is being shifted to another media.

Importance of Data Recovery

Data recovery importance is known by enterprises in which data is the lifeblood of their business. Many organizations in education, government and business need data recovery because data is a valuable asset.

Causes of Media Detrimental

Storage media can damage and obviously as a result data on it can be lost due to many reasons. Amongst many some are highlighted here;

• Accidents
• Natural disasters
• Power surges/outages
• Malfunctioning electronics

Main categories of media damage

Regardless of the intensity and type of damage, a damaged storage media falls into two categories i.e.

Physical Damage

In case of physical damage, the physical make of the media is more affected like platters, read/write heads, arms and chips. If a media is physically damaged then system BIOS will not detect the media.

Logical Damage

The logical damage is not severe as compare to physical damage. It is more likely caused by human error such as accidental deletion or formatting and virus attack. In logical damage the logical aspects of the storage media are affected such as problem encountered in partition table and file system. The system BIOS will detect the storage media but it will not boot.