Everything you Need to Know About Data Recovery
Data recovery is the process to retrieve lost, tampered or erased data. One can find these data in programs, storage devices or media files. You have to perform data recovery if you cannot access the data in the usual way. You can recover data from various devices. These include hard disk drives (HDD), thumb drives, solid state drives and even DVDs.
Why Must you Recover Data?
People perform data recovery for numerous reasons. The most common reason is due to damaged or malfunctioning operating systems and storage devices. If the system or device is still accessible, there is a chance the data within can be transferred to another device.
Another situation to do data recovery is when you unintentionally delete a file. While the space previously occupied by the deleted file is freed up, its components is not instantly removed from the physical drive. As such, you can still retrieve the file if it is not overwritten by other data files.
Data Recovery Process
There are typically four stages for a successful data recovery. However, this differs based on the kind of data distortion and recovery process required.
Stage 1: Fix the Data Device
The data device must be able to function, somehow, before you can recover the data. Or at the very minimum, you must be able to read the data from it. As such, you may need to fix the data device if it is damaged before you can read and retrieve the data.
For example, if you are recovering data from a HDD, then you may need to do a few repairs depending on the damage. You may need to change the heads if they are not good or replace the printed circuit board (PCB) if they are faulty.
Stage 2: Copy the Data to a New Data Device
This stage is very crucial, especially if your current data device is malfunctioning. There’s a higher chance of losing more data if you continue to use the faulty device. Hence you should quickly copy the data from the faulty device to a new or working one. Thereafter, you can run tests and retrieval processes without damaging the source.
Stage 3: Recover the Data
It is appropriate to recover the data once you have copied the data to another device. You may need to run a data recovery software to perform the process. Once you run the software, the basic recovery steps are stated below.
1) Select the data recovery module.
2) Choose the location to recover the data from and run a scan.
3) Once the scan is complete, choose the files to perform data recovery and the location to store the saved files.
Stage 4: Fix Damaged Files After Data Recovery
Damaged data can happen for a variety of reasons even after you do the recovery process. If this happens, you have to reconstruct the data so that it becomes readable again. You can run softwares to do this or reconstruct the data manually via a hex editor.
Need Help to Recover Data from your Computer?
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