Computer data recovery software came into use in the early 1990s as PC hard drives began to grow in size. Prior to that time most file storage was placed onto floppy disks. Indeed with a size limitation of 1.44 MB, most data storage was placed on hundreds of these 3.5 inch floppies. As hard drives grew into gigabytes from megabytes people began to entrust more of their data to internal hard drive storage. Unfortunately these devices were prone to failure. This is primarily caused by hard drive motors burning out and hard drive control boards overheating. When these problems occurred, the only solution was to remove the computer hard drive and send it to a data recovery service lab. These labs would then repair the hard drive and either return it to the customer or if the repair was thought to be temporary copy from the drive all stored data.
By the mid 1990s computer hard drives had become extremely reliable. So much so in fact that physical breakdown of hard drives became a rarity. Still, the public perception was that a crashed hard drive needed to be removed from the computer and sent to a service laboratory. Once these crashed drives were received at the service labs and it was determined that they were merely suffering from software maladies the data recovery service labs proceeded to develop and use special computer data recovery software. This software would scan a hard drive and recognize recently deleted files. For almost 10 years this software became a proprietary secret of the data recovery labs. In the early 2000s software companies began selling file recovery tools for the general public to use. These tools have evolved to the point where programs such as File Finder now allow anyone with absolutely no prior computer technical expertise to recover lost, damaged or deleted files and rescue files locked away in a crashed hard drive.
