Recovering from a crash

Tag : Pictures Of Tools


If you classify yourself as a hardcore computer user, then at somepoint you certainly must have faced the problem of data loss. Itcould have happened either due to accidental deletion, filecorruption, system crash, virus attacks, hard drive malfunctions orjust because you dropped your laptop. Data loss occurs in a numberof ways, so data recovery is done using various techniques,depending on the extent of the damage. Data loss can be broadlydefined as an occurrence either due to data corruption or physicaldamage.

Companies like Stellar Information Systems Ltd. developapplications and offer services to help clients recover lost data.By the time you finish reading this story, you will have a goodidea of how data can be recovered in a number of precariousscenarios, using a range of applications. In this story we also doa case study of how data is recovered from physically damagedstorage media.

Since there are two main levels of recovery—software andhardware—we shall begin by solving less critical issues andthen graduate to hardcore solutions. For simplification, we haveorganized this story into three stages. In stage one, we introducea few data recovery tools for various application areas anddescribe how they function. In stage two, we elaborately discussthese tools and introduce data recovery at a hardware level.Finally in stage three, we describe the laboratory process wheredata recovery actually happens after opening up the hard drive.

CHIP visited Stellar Information Systems Ltd. in Gurgaon, to getdetails on data recovery for different storage media. We gotglimpses of their clean room too. And then we met CEO, SunilChandna, Software Development Head, Kuljit Singh, and Director -Services, Manoj Dhingra. Interacting with them gave us deep insighton various aspects of data recovery. Let’s begin by taking alook at the various tools available on the Internet and in retailstores, and these include software solutions from Stellar.