Discover effective methods and step-by-step guides to recover data from your devices. Stay ahead of the game with our advice on retrieval data or storage security.
In the last series consisting of two articles “How Data Recovery Works” and “How Carving Works”, we looked at how Windows deletes files and how information is left on the hard drive and not automatically erased or overwritten. Well, this is not always the case with SSD drives. In this article we’ll see why.
This post continues series of articles about the internal mechanisms of today’s data recovery tools.
In “How Data Recovery Works”, we looked at how file recovery tools can recover deleted files by using the file system. But what if the file was deleted a long time ago, and its file system record no longer exists? Or what if the disk was formatted or repartitioned and the file system is empty or missing? Finally, what if the file system is overwritten by another file system (such as that used by Linux or Ubuntu if you experimented with an alternative OS)? If this is the case, traditional file recovery tools will fail to recover anything.
In recent years, we’ve seen a large number of tools marketed as data recovery solutions. However, when testing some of these tools, we discovered that not all of them are fit to the job. The major differentiating factor is the type (or types) of data recovery algorithms used in these tools. But first let’s look at what happens when Windows deletes a file.
In Part I of this article, we discussed how microcontrollers are used in all SD cards to hide physical chip defects to create an illusion of contiguous, reliable storage. Today we’ll talk about how reliable (or unreliable) SD cards are when used for storing actual data, and what to do if you have a corrupted one.
Quick-formatting a disk does not physically erase information stored on the disk, allowing a data recovery tool to recover everything down to the last file. Wrong! The Quick Format command destroys enough information to make the recovery complicated, while making the result unguaranteed. In this technical article we’ll try to shed light on what happens when you format a disk using the Quick Format command; what can be recovered, and what can’t, and why.
So will you need a file recovery tool or a file repair utility? Let’s look at some typical scenarios.
File recovery tools have their limits. If you are recovering small, recently deleted files that are not fragmented, you may never need a file repair tool as such files will usually present no problems.
If you had to recover a bunch of files, chances are one or more of them won’t open correctly. Some files will always come out corrupted or incomplete, no matter how good a recovery tool you were using. In order to be able to view, edit, or otherwise use these files, you will need to repair the files first.
