Business records continuously move away from paper to electronic data. Studies shown that in 2000, 10% of records were stored on electronic data, whereas in 2004, the same poll revealed a 600% rise of the number of electronic records. It's almost a fatality for paper storage, as the number of electronic data systems booms each year, eventually replacing paper.

A good thing about electronic data is that it CAN'T get completely lost (except the case of hardware destruction of course). You can't loose data permanently, regardless if you deleted it, overwritten some files over the original data or if you simply lost it inside your computer. The last case is simple to resolve, as all of the modern operating systems come with a search utility that finds the specified file for you. However in the first two cases (especially if you overwrite files), it's getting more and more difficult to bring the lost data back to the surface. When you delete a file, your computer stores it in several location using back-ups which hardware specialists can later access using special Data Recovery programs and tools. The tricky part comes when you overwrite a file and you want the original file back. The original data is almost lost, but you can still find what hackers call "crumbs" of information scattered through-out your hard-drive. Remember, you will never be able to fully delete data from your computer! The case of the China / USA spying scandal back in the 90s is extremely relevant. It's known that to hide very serious spy information from a couple of exposed servers, USA soldiers were ordered to completely destroy the hardware, so that it won't fall in the wrong hands.

Understanding how your hard-drive works will save you a lot of trouble when trying to discover or recover lost data. When you give your processor a "delete" function over a file, the processor "tells" your hard-drive to make the space occupied by that file available for new data. The reference to the file is removed from the directory listings and file allocation table, but the bits and bytes remain on the hard drive until overwritten and some of them, beyond this. Relatively simple software can be used to recover these bytes, but you need a lot more to "pick up" and arrange the crumbs from overwritten files into the large puzzle that was your original file.

Remember, Data Recovery is not a thing to be trifled with and you should only try finding lost files on your computer only if you know exactly what you are doing. If you do a wrong step somewhere in the discovering process, it's possible that you permanently loose the data you are looking for, or worse, cause problems in other areas of your computer. It's better to resort to companies specialized in this sort of discovery and recovery techniques rather than regretting it afterwards.