Must Know Data Recovery Scenarios

Data recovery is the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. Wikipedia

Data recovery sounds like complicated and need more technical skills to accomplish it. Yes it can be such process in some cases like forensic data recovery. Most of the cases are fairly simple and you could have done it by user self or knowing the basics of data recovery methods can save your data well and money. To start with lets see what are the possible data recovery scenarios.

Simplest and most common situation can be recover deleted a file/files or folder. (undelete data recovery)

As soon as you have notice that you have deleted a file that should not be deleted STOP what you do with your computer.

Copying files or any other activity will override the deleted file and it will be complicated and costly task to recover the file. Reason behind it is even after deleting a file (from recycle bin) it will not erase from the hard drive and it can be recovered easily. By adding more files or copying files or performing some actions on on your computer can overwrite these deleted file.

Another common case of data recovery is due to operating system crash. You will have lost direct access to your files and folders as operating system dose not start.

Do not try to format your hard drive or reinstall operating system or run recovery disks.

You can easily get access to your files and folder using Live CD such as Slax. Slax CD will boot your computer without doing any changes to your hard drives and provide you a graphical user interface with all the needed functions.
Copy files to external hard drive and then you can install.

Then there might be quite possible cases with corrupting the hard disk file systems or hardware problems with the hard drive which will definitely look for professional data recovery companies or service. However, that is going to cost you a bit. First question to be asked is how much the data going to worth? Can I move forward without the data? and if you really think it is really really worth spending couple of thousands dollars then do not try anything to fix the problem but find a good data recovery company that suits your budget. Trying to start hard drive with problems can cause more damage to it and will cost more to recover data or make it impossible to recover it.

Lets move it further with more complicated methods and tools (Such as HELIX Forensic Data Recovery Tool ) that you can use to recover data in future posts.