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Data Recovery
Added by Michael Cummins of Computer Assistant
Tuesday, April 6, 2010

 

Data recovery is the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. Often the data are being salvaged from storage media such as hard disk drives, storage tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID, and other electronics. Recovery may be required due to physical damage to the storage device or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system.

The most common "data recovery" issue involves an operating system (OS) failure (typically on a single-disk, single-partition, single-OS system), where the goal is to simply copy all wanted files to another disk. This can be easily accomplished with a Live CD, most of which provide a means to 1) mount the system drive, 2) mount and backup disk or media drives, and 3) move the files from the system to the backup with a file manager or optical disc authoring software. Further, such cases can be mitigated by disk partitioning and consistently moving valuable data files to a different partition from the replaceable OS system files.

The second type involves a disk-level failure such as a compromised file system, disk partition, or a hard disk failure —in each of which the data cannot be easily read. Depending on the case, solutions involve repairing the file system, partition table or MBR, or hard disk recovery techniques ranging from software-based recovery of corrupted data to hardware replacement on a physically damaged disk. These last two typically indicate the permanent failure of the disk, thus "recovery" means sufficient repair for a one-time recovery of files.

A third type involves the process of retrieving files that have been "deleted" from a storage media, since the files are usually not erased in any way but are merely deleted from the directory listings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_recovery

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Simon S.
Friday, May 18, 2012

Its very important for cases of mistaken deletion of files that the user understand that once a file is deleted the FAT table (file access table) only marks the file name as deleted and releases the space it occupied for other files to be copied there. Therefore it is critical for users that mistakenly erase files and want to get them back that they must not put anything else on the computer disk where the files have been marked as deleted. For the best results of recovery of unwanted deletion the recovery should be from another disk device which often not practical. Do not recover files to the same disk you are trying to recover from. Suggestion for prevention and cure: Backup daily files to another device or partition (this can setup automatically at say 3am every morning) Have a file recovery program already installed on your computer disk volume before attempting recovery Add an external USB device and install the recovery programs on it, make sure it has enough free space to recover your recovered files Norton has the best commercial file recovery programs, but there are free programs (Convar - File Recovery version 4.00 or higher) These programs can also be used in a similar manner with physical damaged media, making sure you install any programs on safe secondary devices (other hard drives not effected by corruption) Avoid all your nightmares by having a very consistent and regular backup procedure. backup is built into your OS - USE IT. Remember if your data is in two places all the time your chances of a major data loss are minimal. Windows start menu type backup. Good luck.

 
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