What is Possible with Data Recovery ?

If you live in the 21^st century, you don’t have to be a computer geek to know about data loss and recovery. Nowadays, every person with a phone has gone through the troublesome endeavor of suffering from data loss. Data recovery is the practice or method applied to retain lost or accidentally deleted data on devices such as computers and smartphones.

How Is Data Lost in the First Place?

Data is present on the hard drive’s surface called platter, and this component spins at a speed of up to 1500 rotations per minute. The data is read by arms that function extremely close to the surface of the hard drive on which data is stored. Failure of these arms to operate effectively leads to the data being lost or altered. However,  Your precious documents and files aren’t deleted yet and are still lingering around somewhere on the surface of the platter.

How Is Data Recovered?

The job of data recovery programs and methods is to bring back your essential data from being lost forever. The strong algorithms employed by a data recovery program search for altered or abruptly deleted segments of files and brought them back from the Master Boot Record. However, it’s important to remember that the process of data recovery is no miracle. Rather, it’s just a succession of algorithms that mix and match to find your desired files. This makes it imperative that any tech user knows what is possible with data recovery and what isn’t.

What are The Possibilities of Data Recovery?

Recovering your ‘permanently’ deleted files is possible as long as you’re making an effort with the right device. This means that the data should have been present on a hard disk, USB flash drive, memory card, DVD, or hand-held devices such as tablets or smartphones. These devices are compatible with most of the recovery methods and applications out there. Meanwhile, it’s paramount that users of these devices know the requirements before attempting to recover data. For example, Android-based devices have to be rooted before a recovery method is implemented.

There are still some challenges regarding the success rate of data recovery, but it’s important to consider that there are many powerful programs out there with great potential. This means that you needn’t be worried about little or common cases of data loss. After all, developments have led to recovery methods being employed for the retrieval of ‘seemingly’ deleted files from complex storage solutions such as SD cards so there isn’t much that users should be concerned about.

The Limitations

As mentioned before, data recovery is no unicorn of the tech world, and even a powerful algorithm has limitations. Primarily, the chances of data retrieval highly depend on the circumstances in which data was lost. Files accidentally dragged to the recycling bin or formatted can be reclaimed but only as long as an anti-virus program hasn’t overwritten the device.

Other cases in which data recovery isn’t possible if the storage device has undergone severe damage or infection by a virus. Moreover, attempting to recover files long after they can’t be accessed will also be problematic. It’s better to stay on the safe side and stop using the storage device as soon as it begins to stop working.