What Is Involved in the Data Recovery Process?

By Lina Martinez

It happens to everyone: important data on your computer at home or within your network at work becomes corrupt, lost, or inaccessible. This could happen for a wide range of reasons, from hacking and theft to natural disasters destroying hardware, and simple human error. While this can be devastating at first, as well as scary, there are data recovery options out there that you can turn to. Check out the information below to learn a bit about what is involved in the data recovery process, so you will know what to expect.

First Off, Leave It to the Experts

If your data ever needs to be recovered and restored, it might only be that the file allocation table is not functioning as it should. This means that the actual files might still be on your hard drive in great condition, without being encrypted or damaged. But, if the files are missing, encrypted, or damaged, or if your files are damaged physically, they will need to be recovered and reconstructed, respectively. You can attempt recovering your data yourself, but you are likely going to be unsuccessful because you don’t have the tools necessary to get the job done right. Therefore, it really is best to hire professionals, especially when it comes to opening up a drive and taking it apart without causing any damage. Pros will open your drive in a data recovery clean room, which is a highly controlled environment that is free of nearly every environmental pollutant. This is important because just a speck of dust could cause your drive to crash, making recovery impossible.

What Do Data Recovery Specialists Do?

Data recovery specialists will be able to take a few different approaches when it comes to getting your data back for you. For example, they could rebuild areas of your hard drive, as well as create disk images. They also have access to sophisticated software that could actually repair any parts of your drive that have been corrupted.

First, they will evaluate your drive to determine the best way to recover your data. Next, data recovery will take place using mechanical repairs, mirror images of the hard drive, and other specialized equipment. Finally, the data is returned to you in the form of a new external drive, CD or DVD, or hard drive.

Prepare in Advance by Backing Everything Up

While it is a good idea to backup your data to a physical hard drive, if that drive were to ever fail or be destroyed, you could still lose everything. Therefore, experts recommend having multiple backups in place at all times. You could have files on your computer itself, on your hard drive, and on a cloud server, as an example. In this way, if one fails, you will still have another backup from which you can access your files and keep working.

Now that you have a better understanding of what is involved in the data recovery process, you can rest assured that, if you ever do need help with recovering files, experts have a few tricks up their sleeves.