You have probably had to endure at some stage of your life the subtle foreign babble that many people tend to speak that are involved in technical employment 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 services companies.
When you have a data recovery problem the chances are that your problem will be described as one of two different types and these are logical problems and physical and physical problems, although to add to the confusion there are some grey areas where the two overlap.
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.
Just as with any mechanical device if you keep on using it further damage can occur for example inside a hard drive is a reading/ writing arm (called read/write heads). If this comes into contact with the internal spinning drive (head crash) it creates debris which then causes further crashes and in extreme cases this cycle continues until the platter is destroyed beyond repair.
Logical problems tend to revolve around file loss or damage of some description and generally this is not as serious (or as costly) to recover although this may not be the case if somebody has made a bodged data recovery attempt. Generally the files and folders are still on the drive (even if they have been deleted or the drive has been formatted) somewhere but they can’t be seen or perhaps simply can’t be read as they may have become corrupted (file corruption) in some way.
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.
Other physical failures if you want to know more may include head crashes, drive degradation causing bad sectors, actuator failure, power surges that damage the main PCB, hard drive motor damage, firmware corruption, seized bearings, media damage, controller errors, platter damage and hard disk over heating issues.
You can find more useful information about these and other data recovery issues at the data recovery companies website.
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