Also called: Hard Drive Recovery Technician, Forensic Data Recovery Specialist
Rescues photos, files and business records from crashed, burned or flooded hard drives and phones, often working in a dust-free clean room.
A wedding photographer dropped a hard drive, so you open it on a clean-air bench and swap its damaged read heads with parts from an identical donor drive. You copy the disk bit by bit, then rebuild the files. Next is a phone that spent a night at the bottom of a lake.
Estimated from computer support and repair technician pay.
Approximate: anchored on Bureau of Labor Statistics data for a broader job group.
Associate's degree (2-year), about 2 years after high school. Associate degree or certificates in computer repair, plus in-house lab training.
Ways in: 2-year college, Certification, On-the-job training. Training cost: Under $15k.
Majors to look at: Computer Technology, Electronics Technology, Digital Forensics.
Growing slowly. Cloud backups cut demand, but phone and solid-state recovery keep it alive.
Low risk in 5 years, medium in 10. Software automates rebuilding files, but repairing physical drives and circuit boards by hand stays human.
Classes: Electronics CTE class, Computer science, Physics.
Official data: O*NET occupation 15-1232.
Career Universe is an early version. Pay, training and AI-risk figures are estimates to start your own research, not verified facts. The research was written with AI research assistants, checked by validation scripts and spot-checked by hand. Check anything important with schools, employers and official sources. How the numbers work.