data recovery
Sign in to saveprocess of salvaging inaccessible data from corrupted or damaged secondary storage
~20 min read
Encyclopedic overview
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In computing, data recovery is a process of retrieving deleted, inaccessible, lost, corrupted, damaged, or overwritten data from secondary storage, removable media or files, when the data stored in them cannot be accessed in a usual way. The data is most often salvaged from storage media such as internal or external hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), USB flash drives, magnetic tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID subsystems, and other electronic devices. Recovery may be required due to physical damage to the storage devices or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system (OS).
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “data recovery” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.