Understanding Data Recovery Terms
You have probably had to endure at some stage of your life the subtle foreign babble that many people tend to speak that are involved in technical employment and the data recovery services industry is no different
Most of the time that you are exposed to what appears to be plain gibberish is when you actually need help and the last thing you want to do is to suddenly have a huge learning curve to simply understand what is being said to you.
Not picking on any camp in particular as most technical sectors have there own techno babble, but lets look at terms often used by data recovery companies.
When you have a data recovery problem the chances are that your problem will be described as one of two different types and these are logical problems and physical and physical problems, although to add to the confusion there are some grey areas where the two overlap.
Physical problems are as the term describes physical issues with either your drive or your storage media, and these are also often referred to as mechanical failures. Mechanical failures are often subject to hard drive repair which should be carried out in a special antistatic and dust free environment called a clean room (always check to see if the data recovery company has one).
Just as with any mechanical device if you keep on using it further damage can occur for example inside a hard drive is a reading/ writing arm (called read/write heads). If this comes into contact with the internal spinning drive (head crash) it creates debris which then causes further crashes and in extreme cases this cycle continues until the platter is destroyed beyond repair.
The term logical failure is generally used to describe a file level problem some of which may simply be due to human error for example accidently deleting a file or even perhaps formatting a drive accidently (or perhaps intentionally by a disgruntled employee). Where malicious data loss has occurred this is often referred to computer forensics expert to trace the culprit.
(One common problem that can manifest itself and is often a source of data loss is hard drive degradation, in simplistic terms this is where parts of the drive have simply lost the ability to be either written to or read from. The data on the drive may still be recoverable but it is just difficult to “see” so needs to be read using specialist tools. ~Physical problems such as hard drive or media degradation can cause file level problems as well especially in the warmer months of the year when computers are prone to overheating. Drive degradation is when the platters magnetic surface as the phrase says “degrades” making it difficult to either store further data or read existing data on the disk. Data can still be rescued though by recovery professionals.}
Other physical failures if you want to know more may include head crashes, drive degradation causing bad sectors, actuator failure, power surges that damage the main PCB, hard drive motor damage, firmware corruption, seized bearings, media damage, controller errors, platter damage and hard disk over heating issues.
You can find more useful information about these and other data recovery issues at the data recovery services directory.
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