In computing, data recovery is a process of recovering (inaccessible), inaccessible, lost, damaged, corrupted or formatted secondary storage, removable media or files, when the data stored in them can not be accessed normally. Data is typically recovered from storage media such as internal or external HDDs, solid state drives (SSDs), USB flash drives, magnetic tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID subsystems, and other electronic devices. Recovery may be necessary due to physical damage to storage devices or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system.
The most common data recovery scenario involves a failure of the operating system, a malfunction of a storage device, a logical failure of storage devices, accidental damage or disposal, etc. (Usually on a single-drive system), in which case the ultimate goal is simply to copy all important files from corrupted media to another new drive. This can be easily accomplished using a Live CD, many of which provide a means to Mount the system drive and the backup or removable media drives and to move the files from the system drive to the backup media with a file manager or optical disk authoring software. Can be mitigated by partitioning disks and consistently storing valuable data files (or copies of them) on a different partition than the replaceable OS system files.
Another scenario involves a drive level failure, such as a compromised file system or drive partition, or a hard drive failure. In either case, data can not be read easily from multimedia devices. Depending on the situation, the solutions involve repairing the logical file system, partition table or master boot record, or updating firmware or drive recovery techniques, from recovery-based software to corrupted data recovery, Damaged service areas. Also known as hard drive "firmware"), replacing hardware on a physically damaged drive that involves changing the parts of the damaged drive so that the data is readable and can be copied to a new drive. If a drive recovery is required, the drive itself has usually failed permanently, and the focus is rather a one-time recovery, saving any readable data.
In a third scenario, the files have been accidentally deleted from a storage medium by users. Typically, the contents of the deleted files are not immediately deleted from the physical drive; Instead, references to them are removed in the directory structure, and subsequently the space occupied by the deleted data is made available for later overwrite of data. In the minds of end users, deleted files can not be detected through a standard file manager, but deleted data still technically exist on the physical drive. In the meantime, the contents of the original file remain, often in a series of disconnected fragments, and can be recoverable if not overwritten by other data files.
The term "data recovery" is also used in the context of forensic or espionage applications, where data that has been encrypted or hidden is recovered, rather than corrupted. Sometimes the data present on the computer is encrypted or hidden due to reasons such as virus attack that can only be recovered by some computer forensics experts.