Data recovery software is utilized to help salvage information from damaged, failed, or otherwise inaccessible storage media. Such recovery might be required on account of physical damage or, more likely, so-called logical damage to the file system such that the desired info can not be read or read correctly by the host operating system.

Typical data recovery scenarios include operating system failure, in which case the task is to basically backup all desired files onto another storage device; disk-level failure, which can be a lot more complex as any number of variables may be involved; and file deletion, where files have been erased but not yet permanently so. Most physical damage can’t be repaired by end-users and will thus require a professional data recovery expert if there is any chance of recovery at all.

Some of the most interesting aspects of data recovery involve crime and espionage. Computer forensics is the field dedicated to explaining the current state of a digital artifact. Thus also known as digital forensics, this discipline is concerned with determining the presence of data and the sequence of events responsible for the present state of data. It is a subject with many branches of particular concern, for instance firewall forensics, network forensics, database forensics, and mobile device forensics.

The use of data recovery software is frequently much more prosaic, however; numerous typical home users accidentally delete important files and then need to recover them. What makes recovery achievable in these instances is that the file system only deletes the file structure information of a file, allocating the physical location for future overwriting.

But unless that overwrite occurs, the data is still actually present on the storage medium, making possible the miracle of data recovery in many situations. In tougher situations where the data has in fact been overwritten, an even more exotic and esoteric process known as file carving is required.