Data Recovery is the process of retrieval of inaccessible or corrupt data from digital media that has become damaged or has been corrupted in some way. Data Recovery can be used to recover data from devices as varied as Hard Disk Drives, Memory Cards, Tapes, Mobile Phones, Personal Digital Assistants, Floppy Disk''s, CD''s, DVD''s, Data Cartridges, Xbox''s and many more items.

Data Recovery may be needed for reasons which could include issues as diverse as hardware failure, (the tape has been ''chewed'' up, the hard disk drive has failed, it could have suffered fire or flood damage, or logical failure, there can be corruptions in firmware, semiconductor failure, or accidental failure/deletion, a storage device could have been dropped, a hard disk drive may have been ''accidentally'' formatted).

All of these instances will require the services of a professional data recovery company if the data was of such value (be it sentimental or financial) that the cost of the services are less than the perceived value of the data which is no longer accessible. It is not just businesses who are at risk from data loss.

Clients requiring data recovery come from all walks of life, including governments, large corporates, smaller businesses, and the self employed to "Joe Public" who, with the introduction and subsequent boom in the use of PC''s and digital cameras etc to record special occasions, holiday videos and photos etc may have lost anything from sentimental data to critical emails, and personal account details. Students are often grouped under this heading too.

There are numerous ways that data can be recovered from digital media which can vary greatly, the simplest method can involve the running of basic software on the storage medium in question. This is always a dangerous idea, because the recovery data could overwrite the very data that is being recovered.

More complex commercial software tools are available which will do this job more professionally. No software fix should be attempted prior to the original media being imaged, enabling the recovering company to work on a ''back-up'' of the original software.