Recovering Data from HDD

Learn effective methods for data recovery from HDDs. Discover expert tips and tools for successful data retrieval from hard disk drives.

External Drive Failed: Data Recovery from USB and Network Disks

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.

How Formatting Works
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  • 8 min. Reading |

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.

Recovering Fragmented Files

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.

Recovering Data from Failed Hard Drives
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  • 3 min. Reading |

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.

Recovering Data from SSD Drives
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  • 4 min. Reading |

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.

How SSD Drives Permanently Erase Deleted Data

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.

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