What is Data Recovery?
Data recovery means the process when the corrupt or inaccessible data is being retrieved from the damaged or in some way corrupted digital media. It is frequently used when the data needs to be recovered from such devices as DVDs, CDs, Floppy Disks, Hard Disk Drives, Xboxes, Mobile Phones, Tapes, Memory Cards, Personal Digital Assistants and many other items.

 
Data Recovery is used in situations that were caused by various reasons like hardware failure (the hard drive has failed or suffered flood or fire damage, the tape has been 'chewed' up, a storage device was 'accidentally' dropped or formatted or there was a semiconductor failure), firmware corruption or logical failure. In all of these cases the services of a professional data recovery organization are required in order to restore the no longer accessible data if its perceived value (be it financial or sentimental) is more than the cost of these services. 
Not only businesses have a risk to lose their data. Clients who require data recovery may be found among government organizations, large corporates, small businesses and self-employed entrepreneurs that because of a boom in the use of digital cameras and PC's etc offer services like recording holiday videos can sometimes lose any important data (from critical e-mails to business records). Sometimes even students need to recover their data.
Data may be recovered from digital media by numerous ways that vary greatly. The simplest method is to run basic software on the damaged storage medium. But in most occasions it's a bad idea as the recovery data may overwrite the data that is actually being recovered. There are more complex software tools available that can accomplish this job more professionally. Before the original media will be imaged no software fix should be applied to it so the recovering company had an ability to study the 'back-up' of the original digital storage. The most professional organizations will take two images should there be any problems that may appear while working on the first image for recovery.
Another problem is dealing with a storage device or hard disk that doesn't work. In such case it is recommended to send the most critical data to a high-profile data recovery specialist.
As soon as you will find an appropriate company for data recovery, if your storage device does not working it will most probably require spare parts. Some specialist companies sell spare parts of old and rare digital media thus allowing data recovery companies to get an access to the original data for a time long enough to image it to a stable storage device and make it possible to achieve a safe recovery attempt.
Generally the data recovery is done when a list of the recovered files had been sent to the client. If the client approves such a list the company sends him the data, which had been previously recorded on an appropriate media like DVD, CD, floppy disk or a hard disk drive. As an alternative in case if a file is considered important or critical it may be encrypted and then emailed. It is important to notice that there are situations when recovering any data is impossible.