Recover deleted files from hard disk
With the many data recovery products offering to undelete your deleted files in a matter of minutes, have you ever wondered just how exactly it works, and why it’s at all possible? In this article, we’ll have a look at what Windows does when deleting a file, and what those tools do to reverse it.
Fragmentation. Hurting computer performance and making your files less recoverable, fragmentation can become your worst enemy when it comes to recovering lost data. Why does that happen, what can be done to recover fragmented files, and how to avoid fragmentation in the first place? Read along to find out.
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.
In the first article called “How SSD Drives Permanently Erase Deleted Data” we described the reasons for SSD drives to erase your data permanently as soon as you erase a file, quick-format the disk or delete a partition. Sounds scary, doesn’t it? However, this is not always the case. More often than not, your files will still be there on the SSD drive, ready to be recovered. Let’s see when this happens.
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.
Dealing with missing information on a daily basis, we often have customers who are stuck with a non-bootable computer. This can easily happen if a system disk drive gets damaged, corrupted or simply wears out. This always comes as a shock to normal computer users, especially if the failed PC is their only computer. Every time we have a call like that, we try to help the customer calm down, explaining them the necessary steps to get their files back. In this article, we’ll tell exactly what to do if you encounter a non-bootable PC and want to fix it at home.
In our previous articles, we’ve been talking about recovering deleted files, fixing accidental damage and dealing with formatted or inaccessible disks. Today we’re going to handle a situation where the most sensitive part of the hard drive gets damaged; the part that contains information about the disk, its volumes and their configuration.
