How to Recover Lost or Deleted Data?

Ever felt the need to recover lost data? Say for example something you just deleted from your Recycle Bin or something that you hadn’t backed up when your operating system crashed? Read on…

What Is Data Recovery & How to Recover Data in Different Scenarios?

Data recovery refers to the process of salvaging data from physical storage devices such as hard disk drives, flash drives, and CDs when the data cannot be accessed in a normal fashion. Data recovery becomes essential in three cases:

Operating System failure

This is the most common case when data recovery is required and is common to one-partition one-operating-system computers. In such a case the only desire is to be able to successfully back up all required data somewhere preferably to some concrete storage media.

As this is the most common case that occurs, there are several methods to recover data in this scenario. This can be solved by using a Live CD or a Live USB to boot your computer and provide resources to mount the system drive. All that remains is employing a good file manager to backup files from the partition to another partition or another device.

Risk of data loss can be minimized by simply creating at least two partitions on your hard disk – one for installing the operating system and then other for storing your data.

Physical Storage Device Failure

This refers to the failure of a hard disk or other such physical storage device medium, maybe due to actual physical damage or such. It is very difficult to read data in such cases and recovery can be just enough to be able to retrieve files and other data one last time. This usually happens when the disk partition tables or sectors are compromised.

In this case, you first need to find out what exactly had gone wrong in the first place to employ different methods of recovering data. Some common methods might include repairing the partition tables and file system. You may also need to employ software specially designed for this purpose. If nothing else works, manual replacement of the hard disk’s parts might be required.

This is easily the hardest case to recover data from and specialized skills are needed to successfully manage a recovery.

Deletion of files from physical media

The easiest to recover files from, this refers to the case when files are deleted from physical media. In such cases, it is just the listings that have changed and no physical deletion has actually taken place.

In this scenario, if hard disk sectors on which the files were written are not overwritten, it is very easy to recover them. On the other hand, if overwriting has taken place it becomes a bit difficult to recover lost files.

To perform hard drive recovery in this scenario, you need to use a reliable hard disk data recovery software.

Data Recovery Will Be Your Savior

A good example of one of the best data recovery software is Paretologic’s Data Recovery Pro. Data Recovery Pro is a very powerful Data Recovery tool that can not only retrieve deleted files, but also recover even partially overwritten files. You can use this tool to perform several data recovery tasks, including: