How Do Hard Drive Data Recovery Services Work?
How it Starts
The process of hard drive data recovery starts with the company making an assessment of the damage to the device. They'll have to inspect it physically. Sometimes, a client will lose data because the hard drive has taken a good knock and the internal workings have been damaged. In other cases, the disc will have been compromised by a virus or other software threat and will be physically intact. The extent and type of damage to the disc will factor into how the company will go about recovering it for their client.
Getting Going
If you took a look at what a hard drive data recovery service does, you'd certain be impressed. If the damage to the data was done completely by software, they may use other software to read the information directly off of the disc and to recreate it on a different media without transferring the threat itself. If the damage was physical, the process gets very intricate. Technicians will remove the disc to a clean room where, if necessary, they will take the disc apart and read the platters individually, recreating the data from its most primitive form. This allows them to get at data that is stored on discs that are physically destroyed and completely non-operational on their own.
Finishing the Process
After the data has been recovered, the hard drive data recovery company will provide it to their client in a useable form. The client will have to restore it to their own hardware, but they will get back as much of the data as was actually recoverable. The software used to access the data will sometimes have to be used to reconstruct it for the program itself to use—a financial software product may rebuild a database, for instance—but the data itself will be there, provided it was recoverable. The process doesn't always take a long time, particularly when the damage is not that extensive and the data is largely readable to the recovery company.