What is Data Recovery?

Data Recovery is process of retrieval of inaccessible or corrupt data from digital media that has become damaged 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 as diverse as hardware failure, (the tape has been ‘chewed’ up, hard disk drive has failed, user has maliciously damaged computer or digital device, or it could have suffered fire or flood damage). All of these instances will require services of a professional data recovery company if data was of such value (be it sentimental or financial) that cost of services are less than perceived value of 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 large corporates, smaller businesses, and self employed to “joe public” who, with introduction and subsequent boom in use of digital cameras etc to record holidays and special occasions may have lost anything from sentimental data to critical e-mails, 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, simplest method can often involve running of basic software on storage medium in question. This is always a dangerous idea, because recovery data could overwrite 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 original media being imaged, enabling recovering company to work on a ‘back-up’ of original software. The most professional companies will also take a second image should there be a problem with first image that is being worked on for recovery.

Properties

Most of you will have come across these three; Hue, Saturation and Brightness; if you have ever messed around with color settings of your images.

Hue: For example; blue, green and violet are all hues. They are colors. The dictionary definition of 'Hue' is; "the attributes of colors that permits them to be classed as red, yellow, green, blue or an intermediate between any adjacent pair of these colors."

Saturation: This refers to how vivid color is. The higher amount of gray relative to amount of hue, less vivid it will be.

Brightness: Relates to relative darkness or lightness of color.

In 1905 American artist A. Munsell published a color measurement system, naming three parameters, Hue, Value and Chroma (Hue, Saturation and Brightness as above). This three dimensional relationship resulted in color identification in this format, for example; 7.5YR 7/12. Here we have a yellow-red hue tending with a value of 7 and a chroma of 12. There are 40 pages in book covering all colors in complete Munsell system.

Monitor and printer color production

Printer: Printer colors are produced from inkjet cartridges emitting minute patterns of ink dots placed on paper. All colors that you see come from just four colors; cyan (C), magenta (M), yellow (Y) and black (K).

As an aside, a mixture of cyan, magenta and yellow should produce black, but in reality a touch of black is needed to get it.