data recovery

To recover data is to salvage data that's been corrupted or erronously erased. Data recovery is also to salvage data stored on damaged media, such as a hard drive, disks or CD-ROMs. In either event, data corruption is the actual deterioration of computer data (a.k.a. your information) as a result of some external agent. Computer-based problems, such as viruses, can infect files and render them useless or harmful to other data. Hardware or software incompatibililty and environmental hazards (such as power outages) can also render data unreadable. There are a number of software products that can help recover data damaged by a disk crash or virus. There are also companies that specialize in data recovery. Unfortunately not all data is recoverable, but data recovery specialists can often restore a surprisingly high percentage of the data on damaged media.