Data recovery is a process that helps in retrieving the data from damaged or corrupted storage devices that fail to function and cannot be accessed properly.
Data in the electronic form is at the risk of being lost due to physical or logical damage of storage devices like the internal hard disk drives or external storage devices like CDs, SSDs, floppy disks, storage tapes, flash drives etc. The risk of data loss arises when the device is physically damaged, or when the file system is corrupted, restricting the operating system to read it or execute it.
One method of data recovery is to simply copy all the files from a hard disk drive to an external storage device like the CD, flash drive etc. In case of a possible OS failure, the data is safe and can be copied back into the system by mounting the CD or connecting the external devices to the computer.
Data recover is also necessary when the internal file system, the disk partition or the hard disk fails, and most of the data is lost or is not readable. In such a situation, data is salvaged with the help of data recovery software, or by repairing the file system, the master boot record or the partition table. At times, the hard disk may be damaged physically, and has to be replaced after retrieving whatever data is readable.
Another situation that brings up the need for data recovery is erroneous deletion of files from the storage device or the computer. Files that are deleted are not entirely removed from the system until the memory space that had been occupied by them is overwritten with a new file. That is why, data recovery in such scenarios would be successful only when the recovery is made within a short period of deleting the files. | 
