March 16

Little known fact: data recovery occurs on a regular basis on every hard drive. It’s true. Whether you like to believe it or not, hard drives are not reliable on their own.

What happens behind the scenes may surprise you. The process of reading the 1’s and 0’s from the platter surface is not enough to ensure data integrity alone. During this regular process, the analog signal is read by the read/write heads and then gets processed back to a digital one. When going through a million sectors sometimes things aren’t always accurate. This is where error correction takes place.

A portion of every sector is normally reserved for error checking information which gets utilized every time you access that sector. The algorithm makes sure what has been read in analog is corresponds to what it should be in digital. If a problem is found, it is fixed, and in a sense, the correct information recovered. OK, so it’s not exactly flashy data recovery in action, but isn’t the bottom line keeping your data safe and intact?

So next time you access a folder and open a file, consider that behind-the-scenes a bit of data recovery may have been working hard via error correction. One sector at a time.

Category: data recovery, data loss prevention

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