Info Tech Guide

All computer users should have access to data recovery information. Almost everyone uses some type of computer daily, whether it is a laptop, desktop of another kind of device, like a mobile phone, iPhone, iPad or MP3 player. We use computers to manipulate data, but computers are machines and machines break down. 

Computers sometimes lose data. Lost data can often be recovered from damaged, corrupted or failed storage media like hard drives (internal or external), CDs, DVDs, RAIDs (a set of hard disks that are used in a cluster or array to store and manage data) or memory sticks. Data is lost through one of two ways. A storage device may be physically damaged, making stored data inaccessible. Physical damage to a disk may result from one of many causes.

Large companies may have data recovery experts in their employ, but home users and small business often need to hire a data recovery company to resolve their problem. Computer users of all kinds can avoid frustration by acquiring and using the data recovery information they need to keep their system up and running. If an operating system that resides on a hard disk fails, a common solution is to copy all the important files to another disk, perhaps one with an operating system written onto it. This live CD can be used to move data files from the original system disk to some kind of backup media.

Disk level failure occurs when a file system, a partition on a disk or a hard disk itself becomes compromised or fails, rendering data difficult to read. A data recovery lab can retrieve data from such a failed disk using data recovery software, but the original disk is usually permanently damaged beyond repair and needs to be replaced. Sometimes data is erased unintentionally from a storage medium. In many cases these "lost" files can be recovered by a well equipped data recovery lab. A data recovery company may be able to recover data remotely, online. Such services are very convenient for home and small business computer users.

Tools that can help you undelete files are not provided as standard in any operating system. So to recover deleted files you will need undelete software from a third party.

Undelete software understands the internals of the system used to store files on a disk (the file system) and uses this knowledge to locate the disk space that was occupied by a deleted file. Because another file may have used some or all of this disk space there is no guarantee that a deleted file can be recovered or if it is, that it won't have suffered some corruption. But because the space isn't re-used straight away there is a very good chance that you will recover the deleted file 100% intact. 

People who use deleted file recovery software are often amazed to find that it finds files that were deleted months or even years ago. The best undelete programs give you an indication of the chances of recovering a file intact and even provide file viewers so you can check the contents before recovery