Why and how to use data recovery?

Have you ever had someone get on your computer and start pushing keys on your keyboard, causing your computer to freeze up or shut down? Sometimes friends of your offspring do this while you are away at work, or out on the patio having a beer. Occasionally files are deliberately deleted by a vindictive spouse, or significant other, or by an over competitive co-worker. And there is always encroachment upon your system by Trojan Horses, and other "Malware". You may also own computers that are used by employees, and occasionally abused by them.

If your computer gets to the point where your hard drive needs to be formatted, and the operating system needs to be replaced, or if you need to get deleted files back where they belong, or document unauthorized or illegal usage of a hard drive, there is a way to recover the data that would ordinarily be lost in such situations.

When your operating system is still functional, you can recover files from the same partition that you are running Windows on, or from other partitions, with certain data recovery software. When you are doing any type of recovery, you must remember that you cannot put recovered data of any kind back in the same partition that it has been recovered from. When you are performing any kind of data recovery, especially non-specific recovery, you must also remember to have an active virus program running to catch viruses that you may undelete.

You can use Data Recovery software to recover data from a drive with a corrupted operating system by using another operating system with the software on another drive or partition. If the data is on your primary partition, you have to have another operating system configured as the master or "boot" drive with the recovery software, and the one you want to recover data from configured as a slave, or non-boot drive. Then you can just go into the drive you are having problems with, and recover all of the data to another place, or find specific items that you need, and put them where they can be found, and then reinstall them where they belong later.

Data recovery software will not repair a corrupted or non-functional operating system, but you can retrieve any important data that you need when you are restoring that operating system, including any saved pictures or work on the corrupt drive.

Undelete software understands the internal workings of the system used to store files on a disk (the file system) and uses this knowledge to locate the disk space that was occupied by a deleted file. Because another file may have used some or all of this disk space, there is no guarantee that a deleted file can be recovered. But if the space hasn't been re-used right away, there is a very good chance that you will succeed. People who use data recovery software are often amazed to find that it recovers files that were deleted months or even years ago. The best undelete programs give you an indication of the chances of recovering a file intact and even provide file viewers so you can check the contents before recovery. Some famous data recovery software is designed to recover lost data which is due to several reasons.

Some tech from:
http://www.easeus.com/, http://www.namosofts.com/ and http://www.computerstar.ca/datarecovery.html