Although the popularity of storage devices has been growing, still the loss of data is quite common. There are many causes of lost files like software malfunction, computer viruses, power outages as well as hardware failures. Fortunately, the information stored on a hard drive is almost always recoverable.

The first step of a data recovery specialist is saving an image of the damaged drive onto another hard drive. The data recovery specialist will try to recover the lost data in this image drive rather than the actual damaged hard drive. The second step in this process is to determine if the drive failure was a system corruption or a system track issue. Issues like system track and system corruption are normally fixed by using proprietary data recovery software. Generally, we do not need a clean room environment to process system track and system corruption recoveries.

Failure of the head drive or damage to a hard drive's circuit is not uncommon. A data recovery specialist will substitute parts such as internal components, writing/reading heads, drive electronics, read/write arms, spindle bearings or spindle motors from the donor drive.

What is data recovery?

The process of obtaining the information stored on a storage device that cannot be accessed by the standard means due to previous deletion or certain damage to the digital medium is called Data recovery. There are many methods through which we can regain the missing files, with only one condition that their content is present somewhere within the storage. For example, situations when a file has never been written to persistent storage, couldn't be covered in data recovery, like the files that were created but could not be saved due to a power failure. No existing restore methods can recover from permanent deletion of files which occurs when some other information takes its storage space, in such cases, the lost data can only be retrieved from an external backup.

There are two types of data recovery methods : software-based and another involving the repair or replacement of damaged storage devices' components. In most cases, repair technicians used a software-based method, which involves the usage of specialized utilities able to interpret the logical structure of the problem storage, read out the required data and deliver it to the user in a usable form. In the most severe cases, physical repairs are conducted by specialists. For instance, when some electrical or mechanical parts of the drive no longer work properly — in this case, the technicians are mainly focused on one-time extraction of the critical content, without the possibility of continued usage of the affected device.

The most typical cases of data loss

To a great extent, the success of the data recovery process relies heavily on the possible course of action taken for data retrieval and its timely execution. This is why we need to understand the importance of understanding the nature of the particular loss instance and know what can be done in each scenario. As opposed to this, wrong actions can result in the irreversible destruction of digital information.

Common causes of data loss are:

Accidental deletion of files or folders
File system formatting
Logical damage to the file system
Loss of information about a partition
Storage failure