One of the worst feelings is when you accidentally delete something you need on the computer. The second worst feeling is when your computer crashes and freezes, and you have to see how much of what you were working on was saved. The thing is, even if you’ve cleared the recycling bin, the data is most likely still on your computer. As well educated and interesting a city as Austin is, and as much as being in the modern economy forces a lot of people to know more about their computers, most people don’t know about the relative ease with which professionals can perform data recovery. Some of this is because as a general rule people don’t understand computers as well as they understand how to use them.
Computer language is at its core binary, programming no longer happens in binary, but it’s still the elemental language of computing. At its core your computer and everything on it is nothing but a collection of 1s and 0s. The relevance of this is that when you delete something on your computer, all the 1s and 0s that make the file don’t revert to just 0s, what happens is the computer is told that there is nothing there. The data is still there on the computer. This means that even if you have an accident and delete everything off the hard drive you can still get data recovery. That’s not the only reason something is lost, most often people catch these issues before they truly delete the file, that’s why windows has the recycling bin. It still happens, though the more common need has to do with physical damage than software issues like hitting the delete button by accident.
The other good news is that for a hard drive at least, data recovery allows you to escape the worst case scenario from computer damage. If the hard drive has sustained physical damage to the extent that it can’t work anymore as a hard drive, it doesn’t mean its contents were lost. Austin is a smaller city, but it’s not so small that it will be lacking in technical expertise, in the hands of someone who really knows data recovery almost nothing is ever truly lost. There is an interesting flip side to this, namely people who’ve used a computer to do something seriously wrong are often surprised that their deeds are still recorded on the computer. However, most data recovery is for purely innocent reasons. Most of the time it’s simply something simple like accidentally deleting an important file, or even more often trying to recovery data off of a piece of damaged hardware.
