The final price of the data recovery is determined after the primary diagnosis and it depends entirely on the work done on the data recovery from the carrier. The price in various cases of data recovery can be significantly different.

In modern operating systems there are two main types of formatting the hard drive. These are the so-called quick format.

At the quick formatting of the hard disc or of one of its sections, it reset only the file system, but the data itself remains intact and stored. In this case, data recovery is possible, of course if on the media has not been recorded anything after formatting. But even if it has been made a record on the disc after formatting there is a chance the data are valuable to have remained and be able to recover.

Completely different is the case about full formatting. In this type of format in any sector of the device for saving data is recorded "0". In this case the data recovery is not possible.

The file consists of a chain of bits, and if some parts of the data for some reason have been lost, the program that you need to open the file with cannot open it, like it gives an error when opening. In this case it cannot be read a document consisting two hundred pages of text but in the process used for file recovery can be restored one hundred and eighty pages, for example, which is much more than nothing.

The hard disc drive (HDD) is composed of an airtight unit and a controller. In the airtight unit are discs with a magnetic sputtering (where in fact all the information is recorded), above the surface of which are mounted magnetic heads. There is also a motor which rotates the disc and a controller for the magnetic heads, which is mounted outside the disc. All damages to the hard disc are divided into two categories: physical and logical.

- damage to the motor or its bearings
- gluing of the magnetic heads to the disc's surface
- destruction of the magnetic surface of the disc;
- violation of the positioning of the magnetic heads or breaking them
- damage to the steering mechanism of the magnetic heads.

All listed failures require disassembly of the HDD, repair or replacement of the defective parts, with subsequent recovery of the information. The repair or the replacement of the HDD controller does not require printing of the airtight block, but requires knowledge for its replacement.

- the occurrence of error in the table of the sections
- errors in the structures of the file systems
- incorrect recording of information
- actions of viruses.

In these damages the recovery of information is performed using programs or software and hardware complexes.

Flash media are considered for more reliable concerning the security of the data storage than FDD, CD and DVD drives. They cannot get scratches, well protected from mechanical impacts... Nevertheless, flash drives can also be damaged as a result of which it may be necessary of the recorded information on them.

Data recovery from a flash drive can be done in two ways:
- flash recovery after mechanical damages or electrical breakdown followed by copying data to third independent media
- if the recovery cannot be performed by the flash as a whole, it is necessary to perform data recovery directly from the microcircuit of information.

Our data of which on one or another reason may be necessary to be restored, are stored in different file systems. The most common file systems ate different versions of FAT and NTFS. There are suggestions that data recovery from NTFS file system is much more difficult than from FAT, in fact it is not. The level of data recovery does not depend on the specific type of the file system - it all depends on the damage of the HDD or the other carrier, and the presence of one or the other file system primarily affects the likelihood of successful data recovery.

Whatever is the file system it does not guarantee the absence of likelihood to lose some or all of the valuable information. The only guaranteed way is setting up the system to automatically make a backup of the stored data.