As Information Technology has found application in almost all aspects of our lives—personal, corporate, public and private sectors alike—there is inevitably a deluge of data. According to IBM, the global volume of data doubles every two years.

The reasons for this exponential growth of data are numerous. For instance, companies nowadays go into all sorts of business analytics in order to understand the psyche of their consumers and of their competitors. This intense research necessitates larger storage and handling of massive amounts of historical data.

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There may be an occasion when you need to thoroughly wipe out all data from your hard drive. Your hard drive may have been corrupted and you need to clean it before reinstallation. You may have secret, confidential or valuable company information in your computer which must never be discovered by anybody. You may be submitting it for repair and want to make sure nobody can access the data stored in your drive. Or more commonly, you may want to donate, sell or dispose of your hard drive but are afraid that somebody might steal data from it.

It is now fairly common knowledge that hitting that delete button ironically does not permanently delete data, neither does simply emptying the Recycle Bin. The fact is that digital information is still retained on your hard drive and can be extracted using software.

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When an old hard drive gets too old, small capacity or faulty to be of use, people often simply throw them away like ordinary rubbish. Today, however identity thieves and hackers can take that tatty old hard drive and turn it into a treasure trove which they can use to steal your credit card number, bank records, passwords and other personal information. This is one of the easiest and simplest methods of identity theft and it is so easily avoidable.

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A bad sector is a term used to refer to a computer problem where data cannot be written onto a sector of the disk, cannot be accessed by the operating system or just cannot be used due to permanent damage. A sector is a segment or subdivision of a track on a magnetic or optical disk.

Bad sectors are generally detected by disk utility software such CHKDSK, SCANDISK and badblock. When these bad sectors are detected by utility software, they are blocked from usage and the operating system “skips” on them.

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With the rise and rise of the iPod and other MP3 players it is increasingly common for people to have digital music collections well into the gigabytes (and more) stored on a hard drive or MP3 player. However, like all digital media, if you accidentally delete these files, what do you do?

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Gone were the days when a data recovery technician was just one of those highly trained IT men who does a monthly clean-up on your hard drive and writes back your corrupted files. The giant leaps and bounds which technology has taken now renders many things, not least of which technicians, obsolete.

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Your data forms the lifeblood of your business. On it depends your company’s daily operations, consumer relations, reputation, customer contacts, accounts records and more. So when you experience data loss, you run the risk of losing everything you’ve carefully built through the years. You want and need to recover this data at all costs and such services require a professional data recovery company to give you the best possible chance of rescuing your critical business data.

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Most of us think that the moment we hit that “delete” button, the data is gone and lost to oblivion.  Not so.  Even if the file cannot be seen in the directory structure, it actually exists in a safe memory area.  In case you change your mind and need it back, it can be pulled out from storage.

The next time you hit the delete key (granted that you’re not tweaking with your Windows operating system) you can be sure the file directly goes to the Recycle Bin.  This is a funny leeway Microsoft gives us in case we are fickle-minded and want the deleted files again.  Then we simply have to rummage through this digital rubbish and easily recover our deleted files.

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CD’s and DVD’s work in practically the same manner.  Both store data as a series of reflective marks on the surface of the disc.  The thin plastic or metal foil layer of the disc gets hit by the laser beam of the writing drive.  The laser energy thus produced creates tiny bumps in a spiral pattern similar to that of a long-playing album.

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Automated backup has a number of advantages over its manual counterpart but is not in any way perfect or fail proof.  Consider the following facts.

Tapes are not fail-proof. It is a rather frustrating fact that many expensive tape backups fail just when the need for them arises.  The tape media may simply have undergone normal wear-and-tear or they may have become dirty and badly needed cleaning.  A case in point is how the tape backups of Alaska’s Department of Revenue became unreadable, endangering the $38-million oil account and the 800,000 electronic images therein. It had to be rebuilt by 75 employees and a number of data recovery specialists.

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