What is Physical Data Recovery?

Physical Data Recovery is defined as the recovery of lost, failed, damaged or wrecked data from a storage media format such as hard drives, CDs, DVDs and storage tapes. It also includes the failure to retrieve primary storage data from a hard drive format. According to the Lasa Information Systems team, physical data recovery is a common occurrence. The team states that physical data is often made unavailable when a hard drive fails. This failure can be due to mechanical or electronic failure. It causes the hard drive to get damaged resulting in data loss. In a nutshell, any type of failure can lead to disk corruption leading to data loss.

The team also describes another failure scenario. In some cases, loss of data occurs due to a software problem, computer viruses or human and natural disasters. The UK data recovery firm, Ontrack, further explains the concept of physical data recovery. The company argues that data recovery is a complex process and only ought to be used when there is a permanent loss of data. Physical data recovery is only used when the data is inaccessible and cannot be read normally from the drive. Usually data loss occurs due to deteriorating disk magnetic coatings, cracked or broken reels or cartridge shells and damaged drive tape. Data loss commonly takes place due to human ignorance to store data properly. Ontrack technicians have to say that data recovery invariably involves correcting human errors.

The Ontrack technical team states that physical data recovery usually means capturing data from defective hard drives which have fallen prey to adverse media conditions. The team argues that in cases of human error, physical data recovery chances are successful more than 98 percent of the time. The team clarifies by offering an example of permanent data loss due to physical damage: Diskettes which had been chewed by a dog were damaged and unable to read data. The damage was so severe that numerical data was incomprehensible. However, the team managed to recover most of the data. The diskettes were repaired and 15 percent sector damage was seen. The File Allocation Tables in the diskette were rebuilt and graphic data was restored. The team, in the end, recovered more than 97 percent of the damaged physical data.

Similarly, the IBAS UK data recovery firm also holds that data recovery is common usually among banks and financial institutions. It cites the example of a well-known credit card company in London. The company was unable to read any transactions for the past week when its hard drives were damaged due to continued exposure to the sun. The IBAS UK technical team was called when the backup system also failed. The team discovered the failure had taken place due to three disk drives being damaged out of a batch of eight. The reasons for data loss and failure were documented as:

• Electronic Failure
• Adverse Media Conditions</li?

• Physical Data Recovery
• Logical Data Recovery

• have a backup
• have a drive partition
• use inbuilt computer data recovery tools
• always choose reputable software
• make sure that software does not overwrite on damaged data
• turn off the computer
• call the experts

James Walsh is a data recovery expert working for Fields Data Recovery for more information see http://www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk