Data recovery

According to Wikipedia, 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 formats 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. Although there is some confusion as to the term, data recovery can also be the process of retrieving and securing deleted information from a storage media for forensic purposes or spying.

 

Data recovery freeware can help you restore files that have been deleted or damaged in the event of a sudden and unexpected computer or hard drive malfunction or failure.

 

Data recovery freeware is an excellent option under the right circumstances. If files are lost due to accidental deletion or because of programming issues, these programs can work wonders. With some paid programs and professional data recovery services costing a great deal of money, many people find freeware is the best place to start. Many people start here and then work up to paid-for options if the effort doesn't pay off with a recovery.

 

A wide variety of failures can cause physical damage to storage media. CD-ROMs can have their metallic substrate or dye layer scratched off; hard disks can suffer any of several mechanical failures, such as head crashes and failed motors; tapes can simply break. Physical damage always causes at least some data loss, and in many cases the logical structures of the file system are damaged as well. This causes logical damage that must be dealt with before any files can be salvaged from the failed media.

 

An interested topic in the data recovery software field remains the process of recovering overwritten data. When data has been physically overwritten on a hard disk it is generally assumed that the previous data is no longer possible to recover. In 1996, Peter Gutmann, a respected computer scientist, presented a paper that suggested overwritten data could be recovered through the use of “Scanning transmission electron microscopy”. In 2001, he presented another paper on a similar topic.

 

Substantial criticism has followed, primarily dealing with the lack of any concrete examples of significant amounts of overwritten data being recovered. To guard against this type of data recovery, he and Colin Plumb designed the Gutmann method, which is used by several disk scrubbing software packages. Although Gutmann's theory may not be wrong, there's no practical evidence that overwritten data can be recovered. Moreover, there are good reasons to think that it cannot.

 

Check out this site about data recovery freeware, for more information and tips in this area.