Data Security and Data Recovery

What is Data Security?

In simple terms, data security is the practice of keeping data protected from corruption and unauthorized access. The focus behind data security is to ensure privacy while protecting personal or corporate data.

Data is the raw form of information stored as columns and rows in our databases, network servers and personal computers. This may be a wide range of information from personal files and intellectual property to market analytics and details intended to top secret. Data could be anything of interest that can be read or otherwise interpreted in human form.

However, some of this information isn't intended to leave the system.The unauthorized access of this data could lead to numerous problems for the larger corporation or even the personal home user. Having your bank account details stolen is just as damaging as the system administrator who was just robbed for the client information in their database.

There has been a huge emphasis on data security as of late, largely because of the internet. There are a number of options for locking down your data from software solutions to hardware mechanisms. Computer users are certainly more conscious these days, but is your data really secure? If you're not following the essential guidelines, your sensitive information just may be at risk.

What is Data Recovery?

Data recovery is the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. Often the data are being salvaged from storage media such as hard disk drives, storage tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID, and other electronics. Recovery may be required due to physical damage to the storage device or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system.

In other words, Data Recovery is a term used to describe a safe retrieval of lost, damaged, formatted or deleted data back to its original state. Although the data recovery process includes recovery of digital files that are corrupt, destroyed or in other ways incomplete.

The most common "data recovery" scenario involves an operating system (OS) failure (typically on a single-disk, single-partition, single-OS system), in which case the goal is simply to copy all wanted files to another disk. This can be easily accomplished with a Live CD, most of which provide a means to mount the system drive and backup disks or removable media, and to move the files from the system disk to the backup media with a file manager or optical disc authoring software. Such cases can often be mitigated by disk partitioning and consistently storing valuable data files (or copies of them) on a different partition from the replaceable OS system files.

Recovering data from physically-damaged hardware can involve multiple techniques. Some damage can be repaired by replacing parts in the hard disk. This alone may make the disk usable, but there may still be logical damage. A specialized disk-imaging procedure is used to recover every readable bit from the surface. Once this image is acquired and saved on a reliable medium, the image can be safely analysed for logical damage and will possibly allow for much of the original file system to be reconstructed.