Home › Devices & Everyday Tech › Data Backup & Cloud Storage › recovery

recovery

rih-KUV-uh-ree /rɪˈkʌv.ər.i/

nounB2TOEFLIELTS

technicalprofessional

The process of regaining access to lost, corrupted, or damaged data, or returning a system to normal operations after a disaster.

Recovery is the overall process or strategy of getting back on track after a failure. It encompasses the diagnostic work, retrieving files, and restoring systems.

The story behind the word. Recovery comes from the Latin recuperare, which meant to regain health or win back lost property. It entered English through Old French. In the computing era, it was applied to the digital realm to describe the high-stakes process of winning back data from the brink of physical or logical destruction.

Word relationships

retrieval: Retrieval is the routine act of fetching stored data, while recovery is an emergency process of saving data that was lost or in danger.
restoration: Restoration is the specific act of putting data back into place, whereas recovery is the broader process of getting the system back to normal.

loss: The permanent destruction or disappearance of data, making recovery impossible.

Commonly confused with

backup: A backup is the copy of data you make beforehand, while recovery is the action you take afterward to get that data back when things go wrong.

Word family

recover (verb): To get back or find something lost.
recoverable (adjective): Capable of being recovered.

Collocations

disaster recovery
data recovery
recovery plan
system recovery

Example sentences

"The company's disaster recovery plan outlines how to restore operations within four hours of a major outage." A business planning for emergencies.
"Data recovery software can sometimes find files on a drive that has been accidentally formatted." A technician working on a broken hard drive.

Memory hook

Think of a hospital 'recovery' room. It is where patients go to get healthy after a major operation. Digital recovery is where your system goes to get healthy after a crash. Recovery is the cure after a digital crash.

When not to use

Do not use recovery to describe routine, everyday file opening (use retrieval instead).

Fun facts

There are specialized cleanroom laboratories where data recovery engineers wear hazmat suits to disassemble broken hard drives in dust-free environments, using microscopes to read data directly off damaged platters.