An Easy Explanation Of Data Recovery
Most industries have their own special language which is often filled with strange (to the rest of us) phrases and acronyms that make it sound like a totally foreign language and the data recovery industry is no different
Most of the time that you are exposed to what appears to be plain gibberish is when you actually need help and the last thing you want to do is to suddenly have a huge learning curve to simply understand what is being said to you.
Not picking on any camp in particular as most technical sectors have there own techno babble, but lets look at terms often used by data recovery services.
Data recovery jobs tend to fall into two distinct camps called logical and physical. The term physical is used to describe hard drive and media failures that can be classed as a mechanical failure of some sort but occasionally there is a crossover between the two.
Physical categories just as the name implies are problems that can affect storage media due to some form of mechanical failure. Often mechanical failures will require a hard drive repair of some description but if the problem is caught early enough and for some types of physical failure a hard disk repair may not be necessary.
Some mechanical problems if not diagnosed early enough can go on to cause further damage and irrecoverable data problems for example a head drive crash. When the head crashes it hits the spinning disk inside the drive which can create particles in the drive that subsequently cause further crashes and then a vicious spiral ensues until the data on the platter (disk) is beyond recovery.
Logical problems tend to revolve around file loss or damage of some description and generally this is not as serious (or as costly) to recover although this may not be the case if somebody has made a bodged data recovery attempt. Generally the files and folders are still on the drive (even if they have been deleted or the drive has been formatted) somewhere but they can’t be seen or perhaps simply can’t be read as they may have become corrupted (file corruption) in some way.
Physical problems such as hard drive or media degradation can cause file level problems as well especially in the warmer months of the year when computers are prone to overheating. Drive degradation is when the platters magnetic surface as the phrase says “degrades” making it difficult to either store further data or read existing data on the disk. Data can still be rescued though by recovery professionals.
Other physical failures if you want to know more may include head crashes, drive degradation causing bad sectors, actuator failure, power surges that damage the main PCB, hard drive motor damage, firmware corruption, seized bearings, media damage, controller errors, platter damage and hard disk over heating issues.
You can find more useful information about these and other data recovery issues at the data recovery companies directory.