Meanings of data recovery

There exist the following few types of data recovery:

“Data recovery” is used either for any sort of recovery, or specifically to the copying of files off a filesystem that does not mount by usual means.

RAID recovery, looking to recover the lost parameters for a RAID array. Despite the array can be designed fault-tolerant, most likely there still is a single point of failure, this is why a recovery may be needed. RAID recovery does not deal with files, filesystem objects, or partitions.

Partition recovery, seeking to reconstruct the corrupt partition table so that lost partitions reappear as they were. Unlike all other data recovery types mentioned in this post, the partition recovery does actually change the content of the disk.

Photo recovery, also called image recovery, seeking to extract the digital photo files files from any storage. The photo recovery does not rely upon the filesystem type, looking at file headers instead.

Raw recovery (not to be mixed with raw filesystem recovery), the broader application of the photo recovery, when the recovery is not restricted to the digital photo files. Instead, all known file headers are identified and as many as possible files recovered. Both photo and raw recovery are different from other recovery types in that the file names and folder structure are lost during the recovery, hindering the subsequent sorting of the recovered files.