Things You Need to Know About Data Recovery

What is Data Recovery?

Date recovery is the process of restoring data otherwise inaccessible from storage media that have suffered data loss situations like accidental deletion, hard drive formatting, partition table corruption and more. Recovery of lost data can be performed on a variety of storage media including hard disk drives, solid-state drives, USB flash drives, computer internal hard drives, SD cards, etc.

What Are the Causes of Data Losses?

1. Data loss situations can be caused by the inaccessibility of storage devices. 

• Logical failure

Logical failure includes file system corruption, operating error, registry damages and so on. This kind of problem prevents users from accessing files stored within the storage devices. However, the data, as well as the internal file structure are undamaged and can be recovered with professional data recovery software.

• Physical failure

Physical failure, especially damaged storage units (platter in HDD or NAND flash memories in SSD) means potential permanent data loss. This kind of failure requires you to take it to data recovery experts with proper tools and environment (class 100 clean room) if your data is too valuable to lose.  

2. Data loss situations can also mean the files are no longer where they should be.

It is revealed that human error is accountable for at least 12% of the causes of data loss. This may include accidental deletion, partitioning, formatting or overwriting without backups etc. 

The battle between virus and anti-virus are constantly evolving. Data loss could be a side effect or main purpose of a virus infection. Even anti-virus software might sometimes falsely delete perfectly secure files.

How Does Data Recovery Work?

When we deleted a file, the system just modifies the first two bytes in the file header of this file and marks the sectors containing the file’s data as available. The modifying will be mapped to the FAT of this file, and a deleted tag also will be added to the file so that we can't see this file anymore. So it means that this file is still stored in our disk. From the file system’s point of view, the file is no longer present on your hard drive and the sectors containing its data are considered free space.

However, until Windows actually writes new data over the sectors containing the contents of the file, the file is still recoverable. A file recovery program can scan a hard drive for these deleted files and restore them. If the file has been partially overwritten, the file recovery program can only recover part of the data.

Therefore, the principle of data recovery is searching and analyzing the file header in the disk to find out the files that have been marked, and then try to rewrite the two codes.

Conclusions

1. Before they are partially or completely overwritten by newer data, files we consider permanently deleted or lost can actually be recovered with the right tools.

2. Viruses targeting and modifying the file headers will cause the deleted files undetectable. You can try with H Data Universal Scan feature or contact data recovery services for professional assistance.

3. Since we cannot delete files with common means, we can only erase them to make them disappear permanently. This is very important before you consider donating or recycling your old computer or hard drives. Erasing means dumpling 1s or 0s to overwrite latent files. 
We can shred files or wipe the whole drive with erasing method.

Information stored on the storage drives can be gone at any point in time. You might get no clue about how and why this has happened to you. Data recovery would be your last resort to quickly and easily recover them. Creating a backup and distributing it across different storage media can increase the chances of data availability even if the primary source becomes inaccessible or fails permanently.