In spite of hard disk drive reliability improving and file systems more resilient, data corruption remains a serious issue. The most reliable way to guard against losing data through corruption is through the use of backup strategy.
If you suffer corruption of your data, the best option for recovering the files is to send your hard disk to a professional data recovery company, such as DiskEng. Attempts to recover the data yourself, especially if the file system has become corrupt, may result in cause further damage, resulting an even greater loss of data.
What is Data Corruption?
Data corruption is when file data or important file system structures are altered to contain data they shouldn’t. This results in bad or damaged data being returned when the file system is accessed or an attempt is made to access a file.
Such corruption can lead to software or operating system crashes, driver damage, further data or file system damage. Data corruption is a serious problem, as it will not fix itself unless caught early enough.
What Causes Data Corruption?
There are several reasons for data corruption to occur, which can range from physical damage, damage caused by malware through to damage caused by a sudden disruption of a data transfer. Physical damage usually the result of bad sectors appearing as the result of overuse or some other failure causing damage to the surface of the platters.
A sudden disruption during the transfer of data to the disk, for instance as the result of power loss or disconnecting a drive can cause some data not to be written to disk. While most modern file systems contain journaling, there are rare instances where this is unable to resolve the problem.
Malware can cause the worst corruption, either to the contents of data files or the data system structures. If you are not running any anti-virus software, you are putting your data at serious risk.
Data Recovery and Data Corruption
Data corruption can make the process of data recovery complex, which is why it should not be allowed to become worse. No risks should be taken, such as attempting to fix the issue yourself, as they result in making the corruption becoming worse.
It is best left to the professional data recovery experts to recover the data, which for the worst instances may require manual inspection of the data structures in order to determine the solution. The use of do-it-yourself software could result in the incorrect assumptions being made, which could lead to the problem becoming worse.
