Data recovery is the act of saving data from a damaged, corrupt or otherwise inaccessible storage device. There are many ways one can go about this. For starters, if the drive has been physically damaged, you could try to repair it. This often entails taking parts from a working drive or device, such as the read/write head, and replacing the one on the damaged drive with it. Physically altering your drive, however, is guaranteed to forfeit whatever manufacturer's warranty you may have.
If your drive is physically fine but you've still suffered data loss, you have what is called "logical damage." This is the term for when, due to a device failure or power outage or any one of a hundred things, you've lost valuable data. One method for recovering data in this fashion is consistency checking. This is the process of checking the specification of the drive and making sure it is consistent with the logical structure. In other words, it checks the main directory of a drive and makes sure everything is in order. If it is not, a list of known errors can be printed and correct. However, if your storage device is majorly damaged, this can and probably will fail completely.
Data carving is another method of recovering data from a drive that has seen logical damage. This is essentially the process of going into the contents of your drive and looking for files that have no allocation information. This means that, according to your storage device, these files are there for no reason whatsoever. A user will then locate the specific location of the files on the storage device, block out exactly how much data they claim and recover the files that way. Data carving, while effective in the long run, can take a large amount of time and energy to complete.
A wide variety of tools can be used during the process of data recovery. As it is extremely difficult to perform tasks like data carving with a system that is running, you can use a boot device to boot directly into a minimal operating system that is capable of running any repair tools you may need. Many operating systems come with their own consistency checkers. Windows, for example, has CHKDSK. You can also use things like imaging tools to create an exact duplicate of your storage device, damaged information and all, and transport it to another device away from your main system to work on.
If your drive is physically fine but you've still suffered data loss, you have what is called "logical damage." This is the term for when, due to a device failure or power outage or any one of a hundred things, you've lost valuable data. One method for recovering data in this fashion is consistency checking. This is the process of checking the specification of the drive and making sure it is consistent with the logical structure. In other words, it checks the main directory of a drive and makes sure everything is in order. If it is not, a list of known errors can be printed and correct. However, if your storage device is majorly damaged, this can and probably will fail completely.
Data carving is another method of recovering data from a drive that has seen logical damage. This is essentially the process of going into the contents of your drive and looking for files that have no allocation information. This means that, according to your storage device, these files are there for no reason whatsoever. A user will then locate the specific location of the files on the storage device, block out exactly how much data they claim and recover the files that way. Data carving, while effective in the long run, can take a large amount of time and energy to complete.
A wide variety of tools can be used during the process of data recovery. As it is extremely difficult to perform tasks like data carving with a system that is running, you can use a boot device to boot directly into a minimal operating system that is capable of running any repair tools you may need. Many operating systems come with their own consistency checkers. Windows, for example, has CHKDSK. You can also use things like imaging tools to create an exact duplicate of your storage device, damaged information and all, and transport it to another device away from your main system to work on.
