Data Recovery Specialist

A data recovery specialist is a person who specializes in retrieving digital data from computer hard drives, storage tapes, or other electronic recording devices. The need for a data recovery specialist has increased as the world has increasingly become more dependent on computers and the information they store. A data recovery specialist can recover data caused by physical damage or logical damage.

Physical damage happens most often when there is a mechanical failure. Mechanical failure can include broken motors or tapes and almost always causes some data loss. Physical damage almost always requires a data recovery specialist because a special environment should be used when working on the interior of most electronic equipment. A data recovery specialist has access to clean room areas that can help protect the equipment while repairs are being made. Once in the proper environment broken hardware can be replaced by a data recovery specialist and disk imaging can be performed so logical damage can be located and recovered.

Logical damage is usually caused by power failure that keep files from being completely written to the storage medium. However, any form of physical damage can have the same effect. There are two techniques that are used by data recovery specialists to recover data from logical damage. The first technique is consistency checking. This involves scanning to determine if the information is consistent with its specification. The second technique is zero-knowledge analysis. A data recovery specialist rebuilds the file system from scratch after scanning the drive and noting all structures and possible file boundaries then trying to match where each was located.

Unfortunately, a data recovery specialist is only able to repair so much. It is always possible that the damage will be too severe to recover all the data but a good data recovery specialist is usually able to recover a large portion of the lost data.