How Does Data Become Corrupt?
If you have a computer, you'll run into this situation eventually; a failed storage drive with your vital information. If you're careful or lucky, you may have backups of the most important information, or not have information worth recovering in the first place. If you're one of the many unfortunate people who keep their important pictures, documents, and production files on a single hard drive or solid state drive (SSD) with no other versions or backups, a corrupted or otherwise failed hard drive can lead to panic. To understand how corruption happens and how you can recover from the data failure, here are a few data corruption, recovery, and conversion details:
What Does Corruption Mean?
Some technicians will simply say that your data is corrupted and leave it at that. It sounds bad and probably means that your data is gone, but how far gone is it?
Your pictures, documents, and other files are recorded in the form of data that the system reads with different systems of converters and calculators. It's not all 1's and 0's--a system known as binary--that a lot of people like to wave around as some kind of tech mysticism, but it is unreadable without the right kind of conversion.
When your data is corrupted, any number of mistakes could have happened. Part of your data could have been written over by accident, and unlike spilling a drink over some papers, it's not partially legible. It can be recreated, but there's no telling what part of the data was taken away. The corruption doesn't necessarily take away from the top to the bottom--and it may not be limited to specific files.
Another kind of corruption involves data pointers and references. You may click or even type commands to get the data you want, but the ability to access the data at all is...well, more data. Your data may be perfectly in-tact, but the strings that tie the files to the programs used to read the files may be corrupted. Or, for some extra weird situation, the folder file may be corrupted and unopenable while all the files inside are fine.
Finally, all of these things can happen at the same time. It can happen if you lose power while the system is writing data and the writing is incomplete, or if a virus intentionally changes the information around in your files. Thankfully, there are people who can work towards a fix.
Data Recovery And Conversion Specialists
There is a specific set of skills for recovering data, and it's not something your neighborhood computer geek can do unless they've gone that deep into recovery. It's an uncommon and time-consuming skill because it also requires expensive equipment in some cases, as well as years of practicing on drives for recovery.
Instead of risking your drive as a practice drive, a team of trained professionals can handle the task. With their specialized equipment, they can figure out if you need deep extraction and file searching, or if your drive is simply physically damaged and needs to be converted to a new format.
Conversion works for many people. You can have the data moved to another drive, and a backup can be made so that you won't run into the same problem again anytime soon.
Contact local data collection services for more information and assistance.