Storage devices have advanced leaps and bounds during the last decade alone, but they’re still far from perfect, especially when it comes to their reliability. A single faulty resistor can cause your entire hard drive to become unreadable and impossible to recover at home

Out of all common types of data loss, physical damage is the most difficult to recover from. Why? Because it requires special tools and advanced skills—something most regular users don’t have.

Modern software applications can do all kinds of wonderful things, but they are far from perfect. In fact, the more complex software applications become, the more bugs they can hide. In extreme cases, software bugs may even corrupt important files and make them inaccessible.

A lot can go wrong when you click the “Format” button without double- or triple-checking which storage device you’re about to format. While the instant loss of hundreds or even thousands of files can seem utterly devastating, their recovery usually isn’t any more difficult than the recovery of a single lost file.

All people make mistakes, and some mistakes lead to data loss. The good news is that such mistakes can usually be recovered from using special data recovery software or native recovery solutions, such as File History in Windows or Time Machine in macOS.