There is a lot of mythology surrounding the idea of data recovery. People have to go through it when they delete some important files by accident off their hard drives. Youll probably also see forum posts from people wondering what to do about their lost data after a computer crash. There are plenty of so-called experts on data recovery that would answer them, somewhat annoyingly, with: Did you make a back-up? Nope. And now your only history paper has gone down the tubes.
The theory holds that: If its gone, its gone forever.
The fact is, however, that in most cases concerning data recovery, that statement isnt exactly true. Unless the data has been physically overwritten, it has not completely disappeared. It doesnt matter whether it was deleted accidentally, went corrupt because of a virus, or a disk got formatted accidentallydata in a system is very clingy.
So whats really going on? Well, its not so much that the data is lost. In reality, it just cannot be accessed by normal means. Lets say, for example, that your project, American History, was in a file that was accidentally deleted. Dont think that youll have to re-do those many hours of research to get...