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

The times when we find ourselves at the receiving end of this technical glibness is when we are actually in need of a service so come on guys, get customer focussed and start talking in plain and understandable language.

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.

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. ~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 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 services directory.