Data Recovery As Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2016-05-06
·
919 words · ~4 min read
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Data loss. No matter what you do, it can still happen sometimes as it did to us
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when our main SSD server spectacularly went down, which you can check out in
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this video up here. But, we were able to get back up and running thanks to our
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friends at We Recover Data who worked with us on this episode, which is
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sponsored by them. So, data loss is a little like the sword of Damocles,
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constantly hanging over the head of anyone who stores anything important
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electronically. But, after it happens,
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is it really gone for good? Often, the answer isn't clear. What if you delete a
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file by mistake, suffer corruption due to power loss, or have physical damage
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like a head crash where the read-write head of your hard drive crashes into the
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platters that store your data? Fortunately, there's a number of
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techniques that have been developed over the years to rescue inaccessible data
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before it becomes permanently lost. Let's say that you've been the victim of
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the all too common accident where someone empties your recycling bin, and
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it turns out that you had a mission critical selfie inside of it. Since
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deleting a file in Windows is only actually marking the data as free space,
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it just sits on your drive until something overwrites it. So, sooner is
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better if you're using simple recovery software, lest your selfie get
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overwritten by something completely irrelevant like a tax return. But, what
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if you can't even access your drive due to some type of serious corruption with
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the file system itself? In that case, certain utilities like open source
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TestDisk can attempt to repair the underlying problem with the drive. But,
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if that works, you could attempt a file technique called file carving, which
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despite its name is the process of reassembling files from fragments by
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looking at their headers to try and figure out what kinds of files they
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were, whether they were MP3s, JPEGs, or whatever else. But, if you have a hard
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drive with a platter that just won't spin, or maybe bad sectors, or a bad
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PCB, or an SSD module that somehow came loose, you'll probably want to send it
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off to a data recovery specialist as they have the correct hardware to
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physically examine the disk. If you don't have that, you're putting your
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hardware at risk, which is putting your files at risk, which is probably not a
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great idea. In the case of a hard drive, it'll need to go to a clean room that
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might look like something out of a movie about a killer virus since any type of
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dust or particulate can potentially wreck that part of the data on the hard
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drive or platter beyond recovery. Some drives can be rebuilt with new
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components, while other drives have to be examined by special machines that can
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read data directly off of platters. Pretty cool. Of course, however, even
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with the most advanced recovery methods, you can't get all of your stuff back in
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every case. This can be for reasons ranging from physical damage that's too
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extensive to having proprietary storage medium that needs to be reverse
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engineered to the target data being overwritten before you can recover it.
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It's virtually impossible to recover overwritten data using current methods,
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which is why it's a great idea to intentionally overwrite your hard drive
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with something like DBAN, also known as Darik's Boot and Nuke, before you sell
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your PC. After all, who knows what the next owner might find hiding inside.
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