This tag is for questions about techniques for recovering lost data — e.g., from deleted files and/or damaged or corrupted digital media. Please review the tag wiki before posting a question. Do not explicitly ask for tools or other products; such questions are off-topic on Super User.
Data Recovery is the process in which data lost, deleted, or corrupted can be recovered.
There are a few general techniques and popular tools for data recovery. Before asking a question, please review the frequently asked questions on the topic:
- How do I recover lost/inaccessible data from my storage device?
- USB flash drive not working or is appearing as an empty disk drive, Disk Management reports "No Media" with 0 bytes size
- How do I recover or "undelete" files that I accidentally deleted?
or check for other FAQs. Here are some other questions that may be useful:
See also this link for other frequently referenced questions.
See also
- hard-drive-recovery,
- file-recovery,
- partition-recovery,
- system-recovery,
- forensics, as many data recovery techniques are shared with computer forensics, and
- system-restore.
Other potentially related tags include storage, hard-drive, external-hard-drive, usb-storage, usb-flash-drive, sd-card, micro-sd-card, nas, mbr, ntfs, mft, database, formatting and hardware-failure (and, rarely, optical-drive, compact-disc, dvd and blu-ray).
