How to Salvage Data Data recovery is defined as the course of hard drive data recovery from wrecked, inaccessible, failed or damaged primary media when it cannot be accessed by the regular process. The damage may be the result of logical damage to the file system or physical damage to the storage device that prevents it from being accessed by the host operating system. More often then not the data recovery is salvaged from storage media, such as storage tapes, hard disk drives, CDs, RAID, DVDs, and many other devices.