Recover deleted files from hard disk
Working in data recovery business, we hear all sorts of stories with one thing in common: in the end, the data is lost. What are the most common factors contributing to the loss of data, and how one can protect themselves against such a loss? Read along to find out.
Data compression and encryption are like fashion: they get popular one day, and lose their perceived importance the other day. The cycle repeats itself regularly. Today, data encryption is trendy, while real-time compression is once again out of fashion. Let’s see what types of encryption (and compression) are available to a Windows user, and what you can do if you lost data that was compressed or encrypted.
With the advent of ultra-fast SSD drives, nearly everyone was toying with the idea of replacing their big, loud and power-hungry hard drive with a slim and silent SSD. The extremely high speed of SSD drives is, however, countered by their high cost per gigabyte of storage, which in term limits the practically affordable maximum capacity of such disks to between half a gig and one gigabyte (as of mid-2015).
Dealing with failed hard disks, SSD drives and other storage media on a daily basis, it’s hard not to make a conclusion that, whatever storage media you’re using, it’s doomed. Why exactly are hard disks unreliable, what causes SSD drives to fail, and what can you do to minimize the chance you’ll ever need our services? Read along to find out!
While software-based recovery is pretty much the only method available to ordinary computer users, this method has an awful lot of assumptions. It needs your hard drive to be working and in a reasonably healthy condition, both mechanically and electronically. Your computer’s BIOS must recognize the hard drive, at very least exposing it to low-level functions of the OS. Finally, the OS must be able to read the drive, at least in low-level mode.
Linux. Lots and lots of people are using one or more Linux devices without realizing it. Android phones are running a variation of Linux, with their internal storage formatted in one of the Linux-supported file systems. Ubuntu is also a version of Linux. Many Web servers and nearly all NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices run an embedded version of Linux. Your home Wi-Fi router is probably Linux. Even your digital camera is most probably running embedded Linux! Chances are, your refrigerator and coffee maker will run Linux, sooner or later.
In this article, we’ll discuss the different approaches to recover files from disks with missing partitions, messed up partition tables and/or MBR record.
Single-drive attached storage options such as personal clouds, USB 3.0 and SATA enclosures are becoming increasingly popular among home users and in small offices. WD, Buffalo, Shuttle, Synology, Qnap and many other manufacturers offer a wide range of sealed and removable-disk, single and multiple-bay solutions. Not all of these are created equal. Some solutions are inherently more feature-reach than others, and some models are more reliable than the rest of the crowd. However, even the most reliable storage will eventually fail or need replacement. In this article, we’ll have a look at what one can do to preserve (or recover) information stored in these systems.
