Instead, it's just as prudent to make a copy of the document and study that.

That's because every time you fold or unfold the document, you are degrading its integrity and destroying irrecoverable bits of history. It's important to study the contents of the document, but it doesn't make sense to roll out a 300+ year old piece of historical parchment onto your desk to do so. Think of your hard drive like the original Declaration of Independence. When your hard drive becomes corrupted or physically damaged, every action you perform on it can cause the loss of more data. Likewise, data recovery technicians and antique restoration professionals share a best practice for achieving this objective: handle the delicate object as little as possible. The goal is to recover as much valuable information as possible while keeping the original source material intact.

The job of a technician tasked with recovering data from a heavily damaged disk is similar to that of a restoration expert working on an antique or historical document.

Disk copy technician