Linux Data Recovery To Data Loss Due To Write-Back Caching Techniques
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Linux Data Recovery to Data Loss Due to Write-Back Caching Techniques

In digital world, every single day, you can witness a new technological advancement, even over the advanced of the things. The 'caching' technique is one of the instances that has been devised to increase the efficiency and speed of the system performance. Through caching, data can be temporarily stored in the virtual memory before it is being written to the disk and can be accessed much faster. Sometimes, in LINUX systems, caching causes severe corruption to the file system and your data in the affected drive becomes missing or inaccessible. These instances of data loss can be countered and the recovery of your valuable data can be done through technologies like LINUX data recovery.

The problem:

While writing to a disk using the Write-back caching technique, the system shuts down followed by a power surge. The situation resulted in severe system error and some data in the drive went missing or inaccessible.

A brief about 'Caching':

In general, caching is a process of storing data that has been computed earlier or is frequently needed by the system. Furthermore, if certain process is triggering the same set of instructions for transferring data, then storing the data or the instructions in RAM can significantly increase the performance of the whole process. Data in the cache can be accessed much faster. There are several caching techniques based on the Write policy and Write-back caching is one of them.

In case of Write-back caching, data is not immediately mirrored to the storage device, the cache retains the data until it is fully read. The next step is to find the space for writing and cache marks the same as 'Dirty', then finally it writes the whole data from the buffer cache.

This techniques of caching has been implemented in a number of RAID controllers and is supported by most of the microprocessors. Problem is more prominent in case of non-journaled file systems, where information is directly written to the file system. If a write process has started, but not properly finished due to any improper shut down or hardware failure, the cache memory cannot be flushed to the specified location in the disk. Thus, the file system gets corrupted resulting the loss or inaccessibility of the corresponding meta data.

In these situations, the lost data can be recovered from the updated backup. Still some currently processed data can never be recovered as the file system corruption needs to be addressed with formatting and fresh partition. Moreover, if backup is not available, the situation becomes more worse and you don't have any other option except Linux data recovery.

Linux data recovery software have inbuilt techniques that are developed, suiting to the file system storage structure and can successfully recover all your lost or inaccessible data.

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