What is Data Recovery and How it Works?

Written By Oliver Powell
Approved By Rohit Arora
Updated on 20 Mar, 2023
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Summary: Have you ever lost data from your digital device and wondered how you could recover it immediately? This blog describes the process of data recovery in detail and gives you smart suggestions on safeguarding your valuable data. If you happen to lose your data, then don't worry, a data recovery software such as Stellar Free Data Recovery can trace your lost data and recover it. Download the software from the button below and recover up to 1GB of your data for free.

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How does data recovery work?

Loss of data in storage devices remains a cause of concern for users and businesses alike. Data is a most critical asset in today’s digital world and any loss of important data can lead to financial, legal, and emotional trouble.

Fortunately, any information stored on a storage media is almost always recoverable. The process of recovery of inaccessible data, due to the device’s logical or physical failure is known as “Data Recovery.”

Let us look at the logical and physical device failures and see the different ways data loss can happen.

Logical failures: Data loss due to accidental data deletion, drive formatting, volume deletion, drive corruption, boot failure, reinstallation of an operating system, etc. comes under logical failure.

Physical failures:Data loss due to bad areas in the physical storage space, connectivity issue, component damage, electronic equipment malfunction, etc. are a few examples of physical failures.

A Data Recovery process scans for lost files in the storage devices and retrieves them successfully. This is how data recovery software works.It recovers data from various storage devices, such as internal storage drive of laptop or desktop, external hard disk drive, solid-state drive, USB flash drive, an optical storage medium (CD/DVD/BD), and memory card (SD, SDHC, SDXC).

Understanding Data Loss

When you delete files from its stored location, you don’t lose them irreversibly. You can find these files in Recycle Bin (Windows) and Trash (Mac) folders. From here, you can easily restore the deleted files to their original locations.

Even if you delete files from Recycle Bin/Trash, the files aren’t lost permanently. These files are still present in your storage medium and can be recovered bydata recovery software. The same applies to other logical and physical data loss situations.

What makes Data Recovery possible?

During the deletion or formatting process, all operating systems are designed to maximize the speed of computing. This means that the OS would remove the references of the deleted files on the existing file system(or recreate a new file system) instead of permanently erasing the files by overwriting them. Overwriting takes more computing resources and time,which is why an OS would do deletion instead of erasure.

So when data in a drive is deleted or formatted, it is not removed from the storage drive. Instead, the data remains intact in the storage medium in an inaccessible state ready to be overwritten by new data. This marooned data can be retrieved by using a data recovery software that uses file signatures to scan the entire storage drive bit by bit.

Why Data Recovery?

Data recovery helps you to preserve your personal and official data. Imagine losing your treasured digital memories like photos, videos, voice recordings, etc. A data recovery tool can help you avoid emotional distress. Or consider losing critical business documents, project files, software, etc. Permanent loss of such information can be devastating to your career. A data recovery tool becomes your ally in such a situation.

Scope and limitations of Data Recovery

It’s not easy to recover data from certain new hardware introduced in the market. E.g. data recovery is not possible in a Solid State Drive, which has TRIM command enabled. The deleted data in such drives is erased permanently. For SSD’s where TRIM is disabled, data recovery is possible. The same applies to external SSDs.

Data recovery can be difficult or impossible when,

1) Data has been overwritten

2) Data is corrupt (it is possible to recover corrupt data in some cases but it is difficult)

3) Data is present in a bad sector of the drive.

How to prevent loss of data?

Prevention is always better than cure, and backing up your data prevents you from permanent data loss.

Creating a backup in an external USB device and regularly updating it is a great data hygiene practice. Another option is to create a backup in the Cloud. You can use Windows OneDrive, iCloud or third-party services such as Dropbox, Zoho, etc. The biggest advantage of having a cloud backup is the flexibility you get to access your data anytime and on any device. Plus, the security of your data becomes the responsibility of the cloud vendor. Cloud backup services are usually paid services, so please compare the prices and features before opting for a plan.

Loss of data can also occur due to virus attacks. Having a good anti-virus software can shield your computer from the virus and help you preserve your valuable data.

To avoid data loss due to power surges, it is advisable to have a UPS..

Finally

You can lose your valuable information stored on your storage device at any point in time. There are various scenarios such as accidental deletion, virus attacks, software crashes, physical damage, etc. which can lead to loss of data and lead to emotional distress. To avoid such consequences, you should take regular backup of your data.

In the absence of data back-up,you can opt for an efficient Data recovery solution like Stellar Windows Data Recovery. It is a professional tool that uses advanced techniques to recover data from any loss scenario. The free version of the software can recover up to 1 GB of your data. If you wish to recover more data, then you can opt for the paid versions.

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About The Author

Oliver Powell

Oliver Powell is a Data Recovery Expert at Stellar®. He is a passionate technology blogger & content creator, He explores new applications and has deep understanding of data recovery. He has experience in Windows & Mac data recovery domain.

118 comments

Hannah Wilson says:

July 14, 2016 at 11:12 am

My hard drive gets physically damaged, is it possible that I’ll use Data Recovery Software and can recover my data?

Reply
1. Jyoti Prakash says:
  
  July 15, 2016 at 2:59 am
  
  Well, it all depends upon the following symptoms:
  
  i) If the hard drive makes Unusual noises – In this case, stop using it and don’t try to recover your data yourself. The process of recovering data from physically damaged hard drive is very expensive, so for this, you can consult a data recovery expert.
  ii) Hard Disk Spins, but not detected in BIOS: This can be due to the several reasons. Few of them are:
  a) You have to check whether your drive is properly configured in the BIOS
  b) You can check your disk in another system to assure that it is working fine or not.
  iii) Drive carries Unreadable Sectors: For this reason, you just do a cloning of your hard drive. Then either try to fix the logical structure of a clone or just use the above-mentioned software.
  
  Hope this much information will help you…
  
  Reply
Henry Johnson says:

July 14, 2016 at 11:08 am

I was working on my system and suddenly there was a heavy fluctuation in the light which results into the shutdown of my system. When I switched ON my system, I found that I had lost some of my important files already stored in a drive. Will you please help me how I can recover those files?

Reply
1. Jyoti Prakash says:
  
  July 15, 2016 at 2:57 am
  
  Hey mate, don’t take tension. This software is developed to retrieve the lost/deleted files of different formats. Just download this software and use it as per your requirement, you’ll definitely get your files back.
  
  Reply
Prajit Krande says:

March 20, 2016 at 7:17 am

I want to know
what are the actually performance of data recovery???
what is happen in memory location after and before delete the data???
data recovery use which concept or logic for recovery of data

Reply
1. Jyoti Prakash says:
  
  March 23, 2016 at 8:36 am
  
  Hi Prajit,
  
  Here is the answer of your queries:
  
  1. Data recovery totally depends on the drive corruption level, if the corruption level is high then the chance of data recovery is less. There are various factors on which data recovery depends like how much your drive is corrupted? What is the reason for drive data inaccessibility? any many more. If you have lost your data because of hard drive physical damage then it needs to take your hard drive to drive repairing lab. In case of drive logical failure, data recovery can be done with the professional data recovery software.
  
  2. When you delete data from your hard drive then the space occupied by that data becomes empty and can be available for reuse to save new data.
  
  3. The data recovery uses different logics to recover lost or inaccessible data. It totally depends on the type of corruption and error. For instance, the data stored in your hard drive become inaccessible due to file system corruption or damaged partition table. In this situation, your data will be recovered by repairing damaged partition table or file system by using test disk tool or any professional data recovery tool.
  
  Reply
Gary says:

December 10, 2015 at 4:06 pm

If I start the stellar Phoenix photo recovery and stop it when it’s only 50% complete, will I be able to access all the data already showing as recovered?

Reply
1. Jyoti Prakash says:
  
  March 22, 2016 at 4:39 am
  
  Hi Gary,
  
  Yes, you will be able to recover scanned data.
  
  Please let me know if you have any further query.
  
  Thanks
  
  Reply
Thedore Banks says:

December 8, 2015 at 5:24 am

What is the main reason of information loss about the partition?

Reply
1. Jyoti Prakash says:
  
  December 10, 2015 at 11:01 am
  
  Hi Thedore,
  
  This type of failure may occur due to the different reasons, including failed ‘fdisk’ operation or user errors which are usually results in the loss of information about partition location and size.
  
  Reply
  1. Prajit Krande says:
    
    March 20, 2016 at 7:16 am
    
    I want to know
    what are the actually performance of data recovery???
    what is happen in memory location after and before delete the data???
    data recovery use which concept or logic for recovery of data????
Daniela says:

December 3, 2015 at 6:59 am

Every time when I start my laptop the chkdsk command runs automatically. This is headache for me. What does it mean?

Reply
1. Jyoti Prakash says:
  
  December 4, 2015 at 3:48 am
  
  Hi Daniela,
  
  Generally chkdsk command automatically runs if the user does not shut-down the system properly. As you are saying that, it is occurring every time then, this is the sign of hard disk corruption. Please check your hard disk otherwise you will lose your important data.
  
  Reply
Alan says:

December 3, 2015 at 5:29 am

Well said my friend Arie , data recovery is always a challenging job especially for small scale organization. There must be precaution against unexpected data lose.

Reply
1. Jyoti Prakash says:
  
  December 4, 2015 at 3:50 am
  
  Hi Alan,
  
  Thanks a lot for your valuable feedback.
  
  Reply
Arie Slob says:

December 3, 2015 at 5:26 am

No doubt that this article clears all concepts of data corruption and recovery. But still I will suggest everyone that prevention is always better than cure, taking a backup is always better than lost data recovery.

Reply
Martin Brinkmann says:

December 3, 2015 at 5:23 am

Well explained!! I like the way you have described about the data recovery limitation and scope, it helps me a lot to understand more about data recovery.

Reply
Diego Dunn says:

December 2, 2015 at 5:58 am

I had some photos on my SD card and the card was attached into my Laptop. When I was selecting a photo of my daughter to upload on the web then after the completion of the uploading process, it was showing a different photo. What is the main reason behind this problem?

Reply
1. Jyoti Prakash says:
  
  December 3, 2015 at 3:05 am
  
  Hi Diego,
  
  It might be possible that problem is occurring due to virus infection. Always use and update your anti-virus program because it could be the reason for the various problems.
  
  Good Luck!
  
  Reply