What Are The Odds A Professional Can Recover Your Data?

One of the scariest moments involving any piece of computer equipment is the moment you realize you might have lost some or even all of your data. Fortunately, data recovery is often an option. What are the odds that a data recovery services technician will be able to get everything back? Let's look at four notable factors affecting the chances of a professional successfully recovering your data.

Backups

The ideal scenario is that you or your organization will have some sort of automated data backup system in place. As long as the tool is running all the time, there are excellent odds for data recovery in this scenario. A technician can usually login into the backup software and restore the data within hours.

Not everyone uses backup software, though. Similarly, you might have had it configured to save some things but not others. If either of these is the case for you, then you will have to look at additional factors.

Recent Writes to the Drive

Unless you're using an uncommonly secure file system, your computer will save itself some trouble when writing new information by only overwriting existing data if it needs to. Furthermore, many solid-state drives use wear balancing systems that try to avoid writing to the same sectors too often.

On balance, this means the data is usually going to be recoverable as long as there haven't been tons of recent changes. Notably, that means aggressive formatting or blanking of a drive, such as a process that meets Department of Defense specifications for wiping drives, could leave the data unrecoverable.

Encryption

Many organizations and individuals use encryption to prevent someone from simply pulling a drive to steal data. While this helps to secure your system, it can hinder data recovery efforts. There are sometimes ways to bypass drive encryption. Similarly, you might have the key needed to just use it normally as an encrypted drive. However, the odds of recovery drop dramatically if the encryption is strong and you don't have the key.

Solid-State vs. Mechanical Drives

Generally, solid-state drives have better failure states than mechanical ones. Foremost, a mechanical drive could experience such a catastrophic failure that nothing short of removing the platters and scanning them would offer any hope. That is more of a forensic process than one you can expect every data recovery services company to be able to handle.

The advantage of solid-state media is that they don't have moving parts. When they fail, they usually die because they've been written too many times or an internal controller got buggy. Consequently, most data is usually preserved.

Call a data recovery professional to learn more.