Data loss. No matter what you do, it can still happen sometimes as it did to us
when our main SSD server spectacularly went down, which you can check out in
this video up here. But, we were able to get back up and running thanks to our
friends at We Recover Data who worked with us on this episode, which is
sponsored by them. So, data loss is a little like the sword of Damocles,
constantly hanging over the head of anyone who stores anything important
electronically. But, after it happens,
is it really gone for good? Often, the answer isn't clear. What if you delete a
file by mistake, suffer corruption due to power loss, or have physical damage
like a head crash where the read-write head of your hard drive crashes into the
platters that store your data? Fortunately, there's a number of
techniques that have been developed over the years to rescue inaccessible data
before it becomes permanently lost. Let's say that you've been the victim of
the all too common accident where someone empties your recycling bin, and
it turns out that you had a mission critical selfie inside of it. Since
deleting a file in Windows is only actually marking the data as free space,
it just sits on your drive until something overwrites it. So, sooner is
better if you're using simple recovery software, lest your selfie get
overwritten by something completely irrelevant like a tax return. But, what
if you can't even access your drive due to some type of serious corruption with
the file system itself? In that case, certain utilities like open source
TestDisk can attempt to repair the underlying problem with the drive. But,
if that works, you could attempt a file technique called file carving, which
despite its name is the process of reassembling files from fragments by
looking at their headers to try and figure out what kinds of files they
were, whether they were MP3s, JPEGs, or whatever else. But, if you have a hard
drive with a platter that just won't spin, or maybe bad sectors, or a bad
PCB, or an SSD module that somehow came loose, you'll probably want to send it
off to a data recovery specialist as they have the correct hardware to
physically examine the disk. If you don't have that, you're putting your
hardware at risk, which is putting your files at risk, which is probably not a
great idea. In the case of a hard drive, it'll need to go to a clean room that
might look like something out of a movie about a killer virus since any type of
dust or particulate can potentially wreck that part of the data on the hard
drive or platter beyond recovery. Some drives can be rebuilt with new
components, while other drives have to be examined by special machines that can
read data directly off of platters. Pretty cool. Of course, however, even
with the most advanced recovery methods, you can't get all of your stuff back in
every case. This can be for reasons ranging from physical damage that's too
extensive to having proprietary storage medium that needs to be reverse
engineered to the target data being overwritten before you can recover it.
It's virtually impossible to recover overwritten data using current methods,
which is why it's a great idea to intentionally overwrite your hard drive
with something like DBAN, also known as Darik's Boot and Nuke, before you sell
your PC. After all, who knows what the next owner might find hiding inside.
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