Guides

Data Recovery

Data recovery is the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. In other words, losing saved information on your computer that has been damaged or is no longer accessible, information that is essential to you. Often the data are being salvaged from storage media such as internal or external hard disk drives, solid state drives (SSD), USB flash, storage tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID, and other electronic infrastructure.

Some methods used to recover your data are:

Overwritten Data:
When data have been physically overwritten on a hard disk it is generally assumed that the previous data are no longer possible to recover. In 1996, Peter Gutmann, a computer scientist, presented a paper that suggested overwritten data could be recovered through the use of a magnetic force microscope. In 2001, he presented another paper on a similar topic. Substantial criticism has followed, primarily dealing with the lack of any concrete examples of significant amounts of overwritten data being recovered. To guard against this type of data recovery, he and Colin Plumb designed the Guttmann method, which is used by several disk scrubbing software packages.

Corrupt file systems:
In some cases, data on a hard drive can be unreadable due to damage to the file system. In most of these cases, at least a portion of the original data can be recovered by repairing the damaged file system using specialised data recovery software. This type of data recovery can be performed by knowledgeable end-users as it requires no special physical equipment. However, more serious cases can still require expert intervention from MLK Computing technicians –