Recover Deleted Data from SSD Drives
If you are shopping for a data recovery tool, you have probably seen manufacturers mention things like “file carving”, “signature search” or “content-aware recovery”. What are these, is there any difference between these technologies, and do they really help recover more data? Read this article to find out!
The solid-state storage technology has reached maturity. It does not mean that flash-based storage media is as robust or as reliable as traditional mechanical hard drives; it merely means that we’ve reached the point where SSD manufacturers are no longer working on improving the main qualities of their devices, instead concentrating their efforts on delivering more gigabytes per dollar.
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.
It is well known that in case of any destruction of the logical disk file system structure, the operating system and all programs accustomed to clear and slim structuring begin to experience difficulties in determining the file system type. In such cases, the RAW file system occurs.
In this article, we will discuss the main causes of RAW file system, as well as methods of its fixing.
Recovering information from formatted disks, USB flash drives and memory cards requires careful choice of a data recovery tool. Using tools designed to solve a different task may give unpredictable results. In this article, we’ll explain the differences between various data recovery tool in the context of fixing data from a formatted drive.
There is a lot of controversial information circulating regarding the recovery of SSD drives. The purpose of this article is an attempt to clarify what, when and how can be recovered in the very specific case of SSD drives.
