4 Types of Data Recovery: What You Need to Know

Data recovery is a process of restoring lost, damaged, accidentally deleted, or otherwise inaccessible data on your server, computer, mobile device, or storage device. It is important to understand the different types of data recovery and the measures you can take to protect your data. The most common type of data recovery is hard drive recovery, which involves interacting with hard drives every day. When the data recovery problem does not affect the hard drive itself, but only the computer, logical data recovery is used.

This occurs when a drive is still in good condition and data is lost due to a problem with the operating system or the master file table (MFT). The MFT is like the computer registry or the physical location that each file occupies. If the MFT has problems, your computer may have trouble figuring out where the data is saved or stored, even if it's still on the disk. To protect your data from being lost or damaged, there are several measures you can take. These measures include anti-virus software, malware mitigation methods, and automated backups.

Automatic backup can be configured so that you can back up your data for a time at a specific interval. This will provide continuous data protection even after the data has been recovered. Business data recovery is another type of data recovery that involves restoring lost, damaged, accidentally deleted, or otherwise inaccessible data on your server, computer, mobile device, or storage device (or on a new device if the original device no longer works). Solid-state drives (SSDs) overwrite data differently than hard disk drives (HDDs), making it easy to recover at least some of your data. In most cases, at least part of the original data can be recovered by repairing the partition table or file system with specialized data recovery software. Each hard drive has what is called a system area or service area; this part of the drive usually contains the drive's firmware and adaptive data that helps the drive to operate within normal parameters.

Depending on the situation, solutions involve repairing the logical file system, the partition table, or the master boot record, or updating the firmware or drive recovery techniques. Physical damage to a hard drive does not necessarily mean that there is a permanent loss of data. If a recovery of the drive is necessary, the focus is rather on a one-time recovery, saving all the data that can be read. For any company to have successful data recovery that prevents greater than tolerable data loss or business discontinuity due to data loss requires them to have a backup and restore plan that meets specific objectives. Data recovery companies often use specialized software and hardware- and software-based recovery of damaged service areas (also known as hard drive firmware) to replace hardware on a physically damaged drive and allow data to be extracted to a new drive. Any data recovery service provider you work with must submit a service level agreement (SLA) detailing their RPOs and RTOs, security controls they have in place, and their established data loss protection measures. These cases can often be mitigated by dividing the disk and constantly storing valuable data files (or copies of them) on a different partition than the replaceable operating system files.

The good news is that data on a hard drive with structural problems can often be fully recovered when placed in the hands of a professional in a clean environment. To ensure successful data recovery, it is important to understand all four types of data recovery and take measures to protect your valuable information. If you experience any type of data loss due to virus attack, damaged files, or software problems, contact an experienced professional in San Marcos for help.

Joel Metty
Joel Metty

Iced coffee loving music fanatic with his own dad band, and years of data recovery experience.

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