There is now a growing data recovery industry centered on helping individuals restore lost data.  This article takes a look at how this profession is capable of finding documents on computers by using software and specialist reading devices.

The key to understanding how a technician can restore lost data or find deleted files is the fact deleting/formatting a document does not wipe the file’s data from the hard disk or memory straight away.

Each file that you save is stored to the drive as several data clusters around the disk and an index associating your file with the location of the clusters is created in the file allocation table (FAT). When a file is supposedly ‘lost’ all that usually happens is the index in the FAT is altered so that your file is invisible in Windows Explorer (i.e. it has no directory attribute). However the data cluster are kept intact and it is these files that data recovery services are able to clone and recover for you.

Most recovery services follow a fairly standard process. An initial analysis is done of the computer to see if there is software corruption, in which case computer maintenance programs can be used to restore the computer. If there is component damage to the hard drive then the costs can escalate as specialist disk reading hardware is necessary to read good data sectors from the disk.

The majority of file recovery cases are able to use data recovery tools (e.g. freeware like Recuva) to find deleted files and restore lost data. This software simply reads the hard drive looking for data clusters that can be formed into documents. The FAT is also used as a reference for associating clusters, but in the event of disk corruption or a formatted drive the FAT will have inaccurate indexes (corrupted) or be devoid of file references (formatted drive).

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 26th, 2010 at 9:58 am and is filed under New Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.