Welcome to Data Recovery!
Data recovery involves salvaging data from inaccessible, formatted, damaged, failed, or wrecked primary storage media where data cannot be accessed normally using operating system. In case of data disasters, the data is being salvaged from data storage media such as hard disk drive, pen drives, digital cards, storage tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID and other optical medias. This can be 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 recovering deleted information from a storage media for forensic purposes.
Recovering data lost due to system malfunction or user error requires hours of work preceded by hours of research from unsuspecting victims. Educate yourself about possible ways to recover data from damaged disks and corrupted flash memory cards before the failure happens.
While there is no lack of data recovery tools on the market, downloading and trying one after another is the worst idea ever. A badly executed unsuccessful attempt to recover lost files can and does cause irreparable damage to corrupted data.
How would you choose the right data recovery tool to do the job? There are several criteria to data recovery software that you should be aware of.
First, there are tools designed to recover your files and data, such as Office documents, archives, pictures and other stuff, and there are tools that repair the damaged disk structures such as the file system (FAT or NTFS), MBR and partition table. Note that the second class of recovery tools cares little about what happens to your data, often messing up with your files while repairing the damaged system structures.
Second, if you are new to data recovery, you need a tool that is as easy to use as possible. You don't want data recovery tools advertised as 'professional', as only the real professionals can benefit from using those. Let us be honest: you're more likely to screw things up with these tools as they deliberately lack any protection against possibly disruptive actions on your side.
Third, get only those tools that can demonstrate their ability to recover data instead of taking their word on it.
Summary: Recovering data lost due to system malfunction or user error requires hours of work preceded by hours of research from unsuspecting victims. Educate yourself about possible ways to recover data from damaged disks and corrupted flash memory cards before the failure happens.