How Does Data Recovery Work?

In 2024, the economic losses due to weather or climate disaster exceeded $1 billion in the United States alone. Natural disasters wreck havoc in the cities, destroying physical structure, including data centers and storage devices at your home.

Data loss is a common problem in the United States with over 70% of users experiencing it at least once in their lifetimes due to hardware failure.

Natural disasters can jeopardize data storage devices and cause data loss, leaving you at the mercy of data recovery specialists. Let’s see how data recovery works.

What Is Data Recovery?

When you lose data due to floods, tornadoes, or fire eruptions, you lose money. In 2024, companies lost over $1.7 trillion due to data loss and downtime in the United States. Around 43% of data loss is a result of hardware failure due to hardware failures. But, physical damage to a hard drive does not necessarily mean permanent data loss, sometimes data is recoverable.

Data recovery is the process of retrieving all the lost data. There could be many reasons causing the data loss, such as accidentally deleting the data, data made inaccessible due to infrastructure loss, or due to corrupt malware. Data recovery means getting your data back to the desktop, laptop, server, or any external storage system from a backup.

Read More: Learn about key differences between Data Recovery and Data Restoration, and Which One You Need.

How Does Data Recovery Work?

Data recovery is a time consuming task, taking up to 25.90% of resources for recovery efforts. To minimize the downtime, companies need prompt and experienced restoration services to ensure they stay ahead of time.

Once the disaster is over, the immediate next step of disaster recovery specialists is to restore the systems to normalcy and retrieve as much data as possible. Some people often lack in taking proactive measures, which results in extensive hardware damage.

1.     Repairing The Storage Device

Before proceeding to recover any lost data, your storage device has to be repaired enough to get it in a state where data is readable from it. The storage device could be hard drive disks, solid-state drives, USB flash drivers, CDs, DVDs, magnetic tapes, or RAID sub-system, etc.

2.     Image The Hard Drive To A New Disk or Drive Image File

Whenever there is any physical damage to the storage device, the first priority is to get the data off the drive as soon as possible. Using faulty drives aggravates the data loss. To ensure there is a secondary copy of the data on another device, experts create an image of the drive. This image is created on a device safe to perform testing and recovery processes without damaging the original source.

3.     Performing Logical File Recovery

Once the experts clone the data to a new drive, the process of retrieving data begins. It includes all the techniques used to perform logical file recovery if the drive has failed logically.

4.     Repair Damaged Files

This step involves reconstructing the data to become readable. Data damage occurs due to a bad sector and they are recovered using software methods or by manually reconstructing the document using a hex editor.

Types Of Data Recovery Services Explained

The data recovery process is broadly categorized as physical or logical and it depends entirely on the circumstances.

Physical Data Recovery

Physical data recovery is required when there is a failure or fault in the storage device, often deployed after disasters to recover data from damaged hard drives. The hard drive recovery process is complex, and retrieving data from physical failure can be difficult. You need experts with specialized tools and a deep understanding of hard drive mechanics, data structures, and recovery techniques to ensure a smoother process.

Tools required for physical data recovery are:

• Hardware Imaging Devices: Tools such as DeepSpar, PC-3000, and DFL are used to recreate a bit-level image of the data from the hard drive. These tools are well-equipped to handle bad sectors as well as diverse drive configurations.
• Cleanroom Equipment: Cleanroom recovery is often employed when the storage devices sustain physical damage due to water, fire, impact, or manufacturing defects. Cleanroom recovery involves multiple steps, including:
  • identification of data breach and isolation of the impacted system,
  • secure transfer of the compromised data using encrypted channels and protocols,
  • a brief analysis of the data followed by data recovery of unaffected copies in a cleanroom environment.
  • performing validation and integrity checks to ensure your data is accurate and complete
  • implementing measures to protect the recovered data including creating stronger access controls, patching vulnerabilities, and using advanced threat detection systems
  • testing the system for functionality and reliability before transferring the recovered data to the original system

Logical Data Recovery

Logical data recovery is appropriate when the storage device is functional, but the data is inaccessible due to any problem related to software only. Usually this type of data recovery is not helpful for data recovery post-disaster as it can retain data loss due to accidentally deleting it, file corruption, or soft damage.

Advanced skills needed to perform logical data recovery involves data carving and RAID recovery using software tools are used to correct logical data issues without replacing any physical component.

When Is Data Recovery Possible?

Whenever there is a data breach — not particularly due to hardware damage — it takes an average of 258 days for the security team to contain the breach and prevent data loss. This indicates data recovery is a challenging task.

When is data recovery actually possible?

• When the data is inaccessible due to issues such as file corruption or formatting
• When the files have been deleted but not overwritten by new data
• When the storage device is moderately damage

When is data recovery not possible or very difficult?

• When storage device sustains severe physical damage such as shattered drive or damaged platters
• When the files are overwritten by new data, they become unrecoverable
• When the TRIM command on SSD immediately erases the data, rendering it unrecoverable
• When there is a high level of malware or ransomware attack

Importance Of Data Recovery Specialists Post-Disaster

The data recovery market is continuously growing and is forecasted to reach $35.44 billion by 2034. Experts suggest proper disaster recovery plans and proactive measures can avert the crisis to some extent. They perform data recovery using specialized softwares to access the data backups and migrate that data to the target system and validate the recovery to ensure that it is accessible and fully restored.

Many advanced weather models such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) use modern systems to provide weather forecasts. Businesses can take proactive measures necessary to combat forthcoming disaster, such as performing regular data backups and replication of essential data to ensure faster recovery post-disaster.

Want Your Important Data Recovered? Americon Has the Technology and Expertise:

Whether you’re an individual looking for help to restore personal data including files, pictures, passwords, documents or a business that needs immediate recovery of customer data, inventory history, employee records and other important data, we can help.

Whether a disaster has affected your storage systems or a malware infected them, our expert IT teams will ensure they can recover as much as possible. Acting quickly further increases your chances of getting your data back. So call 1-833-437-3487 to get started ASAP, we offer 24/7 emergency services.

Frequently Asked Questions: