Imaging is an extremely important part of data recovery. Why is this ?
Well, more often than not hard drives that come into us to have their data recovered are in a bad way – they may be external hard drives that have taken a tumble and are no longer recognised, or they may be laptop drives where the laptop has had something spilt over it, or it may be an old desktop computer that contains a hard drive that is years old that has worked day-in day-out, and now works no longer.
When drives are in this condition they are very fragile, using standard software (this includes data recovery software) on them is not a good idea as it places too much stress on the drive and can often cause data that should be recovered to become unrecoverable. That’s why it’s necessary to image these fragile hard drives.
Imaging is best done using hardware as unlike software, hardware has much more control at a much lower level than software. Decent imaging hardware will stress the drive as little as possible whilst imaging as much of the drive in as shorter period of time as the drive will allow. Once the data has been imaged to a drive that is functioning correctly, it then becomes easier to continue with the data recovery process as the required data is now on a stable media rather than media that is damaged and not performing consistently