Narrowing down the type of data recovery you need
General data recovery usually refers to the rescue of files deleted from the computer’s hard drive. While it is true that recovery of files from many other devices is also a major part of the data recovery process, the fundamentals of that process are consistent and apply regardless of the device you hope to recover files from. So when we speak of hard drive recovery we can actually narrow this down to many specific areas. There are two basic ways to define the areas covered by data recovery. The first is to define them by hardware. We qualify the data recovery task based on whether we’re trying to recover lost files from an external hard drive or an internal drive. Is the computer that our files are lost on a laptop or desktop computer? Or are we trying to recover deleted files on some other type of digital media such as a camera smart card, a USB flash drive or as diverse a device as an Apple iPod. Data recovery from MP3 players, camera smart cards, and USB flash drives is generally referred to as digital media recovery, that being the recovery of image, video and audio files.
The second means of deciding our target for data recovery is determined by which kind of operating system our computer is using. Powerful data recovery software is available for all of the major operating systems. Of course the most prevalent operating systems are those supplied as Windows. There are file recovery programs built for every version of Windows. In fact most deleted file recovery is referred to as Windows data recovery or more simply Windows recovery. The number of computers using the Linux operating system has increased drastically over the last five years. So much so that there are now available powerful and efficient programs for Linux data recovery. Linux recovery differs from Windows recovery in that the file storage systems used by the Linux OS catalog say than retrieve information differently. This same scenario exists for Apple Mac users. Computers using Mac OS 10 must have software for file recovery designed strictly to interact with the Apple operating system.
Sometimes our data recovery requirements are based on a hybrid of software and hardware; this is the case when dealing with raid recovery. Raid systems, those being redundant array of independent disks, require data recovery software built for the operating system in place as well as the software designed for the multi disk connectivity of the raid array itself.
Important points to remember when selecting a data recovery program Recovery of digital photo data and other digital media