Answering calls on our hotline, I deal with all types of issues related to data loss. Deleted files, inaccessible SD cards, virus attacks, empty USB drives… experiments with alternative operating systems that went wrong. These, and the many other issues are what we try to address with our range of data recovery tools.
Today’s data recovery tools have no problem recovering your data from a recently formatted hard drive or memory card. If you are following our publications, you may already know how they do it (and if you don’t, you’re welcome to read “Content Aware Recovery and Data Carving Explained” we published two weeks ago). But why exactly is this possible? Isn’t the very purpose of formatting the disk destroying everything on it? Well, not quire. Let’s have a look at what actually happens when you format (or “initialize”) a disk volume.
If you are shopping for a data recovery tool, you have probably seen manufacturers mention things like “file carving”, “signature search” or “content-aware recovery”. What are these, is there any difference between these technologies, and do they really help recover more data? Read this article to find out!
The solid-state storage technology has reached maturity. It does not mean that flash-based storage media is as robust or as reliable as traditional mechanical hard drives; it merely means that we’ve reached the point where SSD manufacturers are no longer working on improving the main qualities of their devices, instead concentrating their efforts on delivering more gigabytes per dollar.
Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, as well as their Open Office counterparts in the “open” world are among the most valuable files on many users’ computers. A hard drive accident, a file system crash, a failed USB thumb drive or a broken laptop can instantly render these valuable files inaccessible.
As a manufacturer of a fairly extensive range of data recovery tools, we are often asked if we can develop a data recovery tool for Android, Apple iOS and, just recently, for Windows Phone. Since we are getting more and more of these questions every week, we decided to post an official statement.
While in our experience human error accounts for roughly 80% of all occurrences of data loss, the other 20% are hardware failures. Today we are going to discuss a special case of recovering information from still working, but barely breathing magnetic hard drives.
There are three simple rules to avoid data loss on removable storage media.
- Use Unmount or Safe Remove to safely eject the device - Do not remove the storage device while in use - Disable write cache for removable storage devices
