Throughout your life you have sure to have heard the term data.

Whether it was going to school and reading data in a report, the data for your mobile phone usage or data on your computer, although they are all related, they are not the same.

When we refer to data on your computer, we are talking about the programs, applications, photos, music, videos, documents and personal files.

In fact anything which can be stored digitally on your computers hard drive is in fact data.

Data Storage

At its most basic, computer data is nothing more than a bunch of 1’s and 0’s stored a particular way. These files are in digital form, which allows are to read, write, modify and transfer over other types of mediums, like USB, internet and network.

In computers, the main data storage media is your internal hard drive which usually shows up as a C drive in your Windows computer.

Hard drives are disks which either spin around or solid state drives which are a lot faster and have no moving parts (like a USB thumb drive).

Each different type of computer, whether its a Windows computer, Apple Mac or Linux distributions will have a different way of storing data and will use a different hard drive format.

Recovering Your Data

It easy to think when your computer no longer starts or works properly you have lost all your data.

However, there are many components in the computer which can make it not run properly and although hard drives do die, this is only one for the reason your computer might not be turning on.

Even if you have a catastrophic system failure, of the hard drive is in good enough condition your data might still be recoverable.

The main two aspects of data recovery are usually if the data has been destroyed by hardware failure or logical, the ones and zeros have been compromised or mixed up.

Do’s and Dont’s

If your computer it playing up and your data is important to you, stop using it immediately.

Every time you turn it on in an unstable state, you can further jeopardize the integrity of your data. Data can be like a scrambled egg, if its too damaged there might not be any getting it back.

If you have a software problem of virus affecting your computer, you are much better running an offline virus or data diagnosis.

This will stop any rogue or corrupt applications, or even the operating system from damaging your data when you are trying to get it back.