Most industries have their own special language which is often filled with strange (to the rest of us) phrases and acronyms that make it sound like a totally foreign language and the data recovery services industry is no different

Most of the time that you are exposed to what appears to be plain gibberish is when you actually need help and the last thing you want to do is to suddenly have a huge learning curve to simply understand what is being said to you.

Not picking on any camp in particular as most technical sectors have there own techno babble, but lets look at terms often used by data recovery companies.

Data recovery jobs tend to fall into two distinct camps called logical and physical. The term physical is used to describe hard drive and media failures that can be classed as a mechanical failure of some sort but occasionally there is a crossover between the two.

Physical categories just as the name implies are problems that can affect storage media due to some form of mechanical failure. Often mechanical failures will require a hard drive repair of some description but if the problem is caught early enough and for some types of physical failure a hard disk repair may not be necessary.

Some mechanical problems if not diagnosed early enough can go on to cause further damage and irrecoverable data problems for example a head drive crash. When the head crashes it hits the spinning disk inside the drive which can create particles in the drive that subsequently cause further crashes and then a vicious spiral ensues until the data on the platter (disk) is beyond recovery.

The term logical failure is generally used to describe a file level problem some of which may simply be due to human error for example accidently deleting a file or even perhaps formatting a drive accidently (or perhaps intentionally by a disgruntled employee). Where malicious data loss has occurred this is often referred to computer forensics expert to trace the culprit.

(One common problem that can manifest itself and is often a source of data loss is hard drive degradation, in simplistic terms this is where parts of the drive have simply lost the ability to be either written to or read from. The data on the drive may still be recoverable but it is just difficult to “see” so needs to be read using specialist tools. ~Physical problems such as hard drive or media degradation can cause file level problems as well especially in the warmer months of the year when computers are prone to overheating. Drive degradation is when the platters magnetic surface as the phrase says “degrades” making it difficult to either store further data or read existing data on the disk. Data can still be rescued though by recovery professionals.}

Other logical failures if you want to learn more include for example lost files and folder, virus attacks causing damage to system files making it impossible to access data, destroyed file tables, corrupted files, bad MFT records possibly caused by boot sector viruses, partition errors, and the operating system not being able to access the drive in order for you to actually use the computer.

You can find more useful information about these and other data recovery issues at the data recovery services directory.