Recovering Data from NTFS

Recovery of deleted data from formatted or deleted NTFS partition

Recovering Encrypted and Compressed Data

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.

Unreadable Media. Corrupted or Unknown File System?

If you like experimenting with non-mainstream operating systems, you most probably know about the various file systems they use. With many alternative operating systems being able to read media formatted with FAT (or, to be previse, FAT32), it is easy to forget that it does not normally work in the other direction. Install an alternative file system to a USB pen drive, and your Windows boot won’t be able to access that drive. More often than not, you’ll see a message prompting to format that USB drive into a Windows-recognizable file system. If you confirm, Windows will indeed reformat the flash drive, but everything you stored there with the other file system will be lost.

Windows File Systems: What You Need to Know (and Why)
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  • 19 min. Reading |

Did you know Windows Phone uses NTFS? Why most memory cards and nearly all USB pen drive are still using the ancient FAT? How come you can store full-length HD movies on some flash drives but not the others? Why some devices only support SDHC memory cards up to 32 GB, and what can be done to make them use a 64 GB SDXC? These and many other questions have to do with the type of a file system used by a particular storage device. But what does that has to do with Windows? Read along to discover

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 Files from a Non-Bootable Computer
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  • 9 min. Reading |

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.

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