Data Recovery basically means the process of acquiring back usable data from the damaged, corrupt media or storage device. The loss of important data can cause fall down of businesses, leaving you and your company in the most evil situation to face. Often the data are being salvaged from storage media formats such as hard disk drives, storage tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID, and other electronics.

Data Recovery may be required due to physical damage to the storage device or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system. Although there is some confusion as to the term, data recovery can also be the process of retrieving and securing deleted information from a storage media for forensic purposes or spying.

There can be several causes of data loss. The most common causes for data loss are due to virus attacks, human errors, software / hardware failures, technical problems and many more which results in confidential data loss, business data loss, project delays, loss of personal collections like music, photographs, files etc.                                 

Data loss can occur from unexpected incidences including national tragedies such as floods and earthquakes. Often power failure can cause loss of data from hard drives. Sudden power surges can also cause a lot of damage to a computer’s hard drive. Accidentally deleting a file or formatting a hard drive or floppy disk is a common reason for data loss.

If you have accidentally lost any important documents there are several steps you can take. Remember that if you have accidentally erased a file, it may not have vanished from your computer. It may have left an imprint in a different format on the computer’s hard drive or other storage devices. Recovering the data involves locating it and transforming it into human readable form. Not all data may be recoverable.

You can either hire professional service to help you solve your problem or attempt a recovery on your own. There is data recovery software widely available that can assist you in the process. Data recovery software helps you to recover your lost data from the inaccessible, downed, damaged or corrupted media and storage device's.

Data recovery can become complicated if you overwrite on the storage device that has the lost data. Therefore if you do not know what you are doing, it is advisable to contact a professional service firm.

Data recovery professionals are experts in recovering data from all sorts of media and from a variety of damages done. There are many specialists out there who have years of experience in the IT field. The kind of data recovery operation to use will depend a great deal on the storage device and other variables such as the amount of damage done or the operation system used such as Macintosh, Windows or Linux.

Recuva (pronounced "recover") is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses!

PC Inspector File Recovery 4.x is a data recovery program that supports the FAT 12/16/32 and NTFS file systems. Finds partitions automatically, even if the boot sector or FAT has been erased or damaged. Recovers files with the original time and date stamp. Supports the saving of recovered files on network drives.

Pandora Recovery is a powerful free tool that provides its users an effective way to attempt recovery of permanently deleted files. And that does not mean restoration of a file from Recycle Bin. Pandora Recovery actually recovers files permanently removed from Recycle Bin, files originally deleted using Shift + Delete keys bypassing Recycle Bin and files deleted from DOS promp.