Data recovery is a process of retrieving inaccessible, lost, corrupted, damaged, or formatted data from secondary storage devices, removable media, or files. The common causes of data loss include power outages, natural disasters, equipment failures or malfunctions, accidental deletion of data, unintentionally formatting a hard drive, damaged hard drive read/write heads, software crashes, logical errors, firmware corruption, continued use of a computer after signs of failure, physical damage to hard drives, laptop theft, etc.
