John Ndlovu
The stress of losing data or important information from a laptop, PC or tablet is a painful experience, as one would be left is sixes and sevens as to how to recover the lost information.
Worry not, data lost or formatted is definitely recoverable.
Data refers to any facts, figure, statistics, measurements or any other type of information that can be stored and processed by a computer system. It can be in any format such as text, images, audio, video and other multimedia types which can be generated by humans, machines or other automated sources. Data is also the raw material that enables the creation of valuable insights, knowledge and actionable insights when processed in the right way.
Information is a processed and interpreted form of data that has been given context, meaning and relevance.
Zim GBC News spoke to some information and technology experts on the issue of data recovery process.
A technology expert and ICT lecturer based in the City told this reporter that when data is deleted it is marked available and in some devices thrown in recycle bin waiting to be overwritten by new data.
“When data is formatted or deleted from gadgets, it does not actually disappear completely. Instead, it is simply marked as available space for new data to be written over it. This means that until new data is written over the old data, it can potentially be recovered using specialised software tools.”Matanhire said
Data recovery is the process of retrieving lost, damaged or corrupted data from a storage device such as a hard drive, USB Drive or memory card.
Matanhire stated that there are about three key stages of recovering data whereby the first phase is determine the cause of data loss which can be done through examining the storage device and identifying any physical damage or software issue that would have given rise to data loss. The second stage is creating a backup copy on the storage device. The last stage is whereby a software is used to recover data.
Luckson Munsaka who is an IT expert also reiterated Matanhire’ sentiments that data is recoverable although he stated that he can only recover lost data from flash and hard drives while data from phones cannot be recovered.
“Data can be recovered from flash and hard drives we use certain software tools called Recuva to recover lost data from them as long if that data is yet to be overwritten. “He said
There are several softwares which are used when recovering lost data such as Recuva, EaseUs Data recovery wizard, disk drill, testdisk and photorec.
Recuva is a free and easy-to-use tool developed by Piriform. It can recover files from a variety of devices such as hard drives, memory cards and USB drives.
Ease Us data recovery wizard is another data recovery tool that can recover deleted, formatted or lost data from a variety of devices such as computers, hard drives and memory cards.
Disk drill is a data recovery software that supports the recovery of deleted files from various devices, it is available for Windows and Mac users.
Test-disk is a free open-source data recovery tool that can be used to recover deleted data and repair damaged or corrupted partitions.
Photo-rec is another free open-source data recovery tool that is specifically designed to recover various types of media files such as photos, videos and audio files from various storage devices.
So when you lose or mistakenly format a hard-drive just look for an IT expert to recover the lost data!