In a nutshell, recovering data means that someone has to try to salvage inaccessible data from a corrupted or damaged storage site. Think computers and how they crash, sometimes inexplicably and you are suddenly left with nothing.
That feeling of helplessness when your computer crashes leads you to an expert in data recovery. Sometimes they are successful and sometimes they aren't but they are all trained in salvaging files from storage media like external hard disk drives, solid state drives, USB flash drives, CD's, DVD's, and magnetic tapes.
Data recovery can be needed for different things, the most common is an operating system failure but computers can also be damaged by physical damage and things like tornadoes, flooding and hurricanes; things that are deemed 'acts of God'. Then of course there is the good old virus or Trojan Horse that gets into the computer and renders it in need of quick and professional assistance.
If you have the most common type of data recovery it will be because of an operating system failure and in that case the technician will try to get your files on to an other device. If you have a drive level failure and/or a compromised file system or hard drive disk failure the data may not be as easy to recover and read. In this case the technician would try to repair the file system itself, and luckily some damage may be able to be repaired by replacing parts of the hard disk. If there is still damage there is a specialized disk imagining procedure that can be undertaken to try to recover every readable bit of the data that can be reclaimed. Then the files can possibly be reconstructed.
Usually if your computer crashes and you need a data recovery expert you will take the computer to them, but other times they have to do their work remotely either because the system is just too big to take in or just too far away for it to be possible. This of course requires a lot more skill and expertise in the field.
Simply, then there are four phases of data recovery. Repair the hard disk drive, image the drive to a new drive, logical recovery of files and repair retrieved files. Once all four steps have been taken, we hope that your computer is up and running again, and it should last-until the next time you experience a crash.
