Data recovery is an essential part of our modern world, with computer systems facilitating the vast majority of our lives online and off. The loss of personal information and customer information would be catastrophic for any company, and so data recovery software is a popular kind of insurance for many. But, more broadly speaking, data recovery or memory space itself has been a favorite subject of science fiction, with many plots revolving around the uncanny sensation that we are nothing more than our memories – which, in a perfectly digitized world, would be nothing but easily copied bits of data!

Exciting as these considerations are, for an even more explosive idea all you have to do is blend them with old-fashioned notions of clairvoyance and déjà vu. First coined by New Age spiritualist P.M.H. Atwater (née Phyllis Johnston), future memory is conceived of as the phenomenon whereby one can know the future.

With plain old prophetic foresight now repackaged in 21st Century techno-speak, science fiction writers are busy exploring the nexus between man and machine, self and other, reality and virtual reality. The gist of it all is pregnant with implication: if we are nothing more than our memories; if our memories are but bits of data; if technology can record these bits the same way it manipulates all other information; then what does it mean to be oneself?

Philip K. Dick touched on these very questions in his short story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Adapted into a kind of futuristic movie noir under the title of Blade Runner, the concept centers on just what it means to be human in a world where very humanlike androids can be made.

Another film adapted from a Dick short is Total Recall, involving a government agent’s produced memories. More recently, the Leonardo Dicaprio vehicle Deception also explored the same what-if scenarios: what if thoughts could be planted? Never mind data recovery; seems like technology will one day create the need for deliberate data loss! And indeed, there are any number of science fiction stories devoted to that topic, too…

Data recovery is an essential part of our modern world, with computer systems facilitating the vast majority of our lives online and off. The loss of personal information and customer information would be catastrophic for any company, and so data recovery software is a popular kind of insurance for many. But, more broadly speaking, data recovery or memory space itself has been a favorite subject of science fiction, with many plots revolving around the uncanny sensation that we are nothing more than our memories – which, in a perfectly digitized world, would be nothing but easily copied bits of data!

Exciting as these considerations are, for an even more explosive idea all you have to do is blend them with old-fashioned notions of clairvoyance and déjà vu. First coined by New Age spiritualist P.M.H. Atwater (née Phyllis Johnston), future memory is conceived of as the phenomenon whereby one can know the future.

With plain old prophetic foresight now repackaged in 21st Century techno-speak, science fiction writers are busy exploring the nexus between man and machine, self and other, reality and virtual reality. The gist of it all is pregnant with implication: if we are nothing more than our memories; if our memories are but bits of data; if technology can record these bits the same way it manipulates all other information; then what does it mean to be oneself?

Philip K. Dick touched on these very questions in his short story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Adapted into a kind of futuristic movie noir under the title of Blade Runner, the concept centers on just what it means to be human in a world where very humanlike androids can be made.

Another film adapted from a Dick short is Total Recall, involving a government agent’s produced memories. More recently, the Leonardo Dicaprio vehicle Deception also explored the same what-if scenarios: what if thoughts could be planted? Never mind data recovery; seems like technology will one day create the need for deliberate data loss! And indeed, there are any number of science fiction stories devoted to that topic, too…

Data recovery software is utilized to help salvage information from damaged, failed, or otherwise inaccessible storage media. This kind of recovery might be necessary on account of physical damage or, more likely, so-called logical damage to the file system such that the desired info can’t be read or read correctly by the host operating system.

Typical data recovery scenarios include operating system failure, in which case the task is to basically backup all desired files onto another storage device; disk-level failure, which is a lot more complex as any number of variables might be involved; and file deletion, where files have been erased but not yet permanently so. Most physical damage can not be repaired by end-users and will therefore require a professional data recovery expert if there’s any chance of recovery at all.

Some of the most interesting aspects of data recovery involve crime and espionage. Computer forensics is the field dedicated to explaining the current state of a digital artifact. Thus also known as digital forensics, this discipline is concerned with determining the presence of data as well as the sequence of events responsible for the present state of data. It is a subject with several branches of specific concern, for instance firewall forensics, network forensics, database forensics, and mobile device forensics.

The use of data recovery software is frequently much more prosaic, nevertheless; numerous typical home users accidentally delete crucial files and then need to recover them. What makes recovery possible in these cases is that the file system only deletes the file structure information of a file, allocating the physical location for future overwriting.

But unless that overwrite occurs, the data is still actually present on the storage medium, making possible the miracle of data recovery in many instances. In tougher situations where the data has in fact been overwritten, an even more exotic and esoteric process referred to as file carving is necessary.