You must have heard for this term with many data recovery applications, “RAW” recovery. What exactly it means? Instead of a direct explanation of this term, it is mandatory for us to understand how it is related to data recovery.

FAT or NTFS are the two file systems that are supported by Microsoft Windows, FAT file system is dependent on file allocation tables, whereas NTFS depends on Master file tables called MFT. MFT and FAT holds the allocation information for a file or a folder. There are various sorts of situations, which may damage these file and folder allocation information. If this information is lost, there is no information for any data recovery software to locate the file.

The loss of this critical information is dangerous and as most of the data recovery companies are scratching there head for various ways to get lost data recovered, this method of performing raw scan came into existence. This is method which is the backbone of all file recovery applications, photo or music recovery software.

Therefore, it is extremely clear that when file system is completely damaged so that it is not possible to get the allocation for files, which are stored on the drive and there is no way to identify them. RAW recovery is extremely beneficial and pulling such files out of hard drives. RAW recovery for me should not be dependent on any file system as it works on unique file signatures (every file has a unique ID or signature).

Well the other most important part of file recovery of raw scan is in depth knowledge of the file type, by putting the signatures of all file types and giving a tentative size to look for will not be always successful. This in depth knowledge of file helps in identifying correct file size. Thus, the best file recovery software is the one that is able to identify a file using a signature and knows various other ways to get the file size.

In the end, the only limitation with file recovery would be recovery of files without the actual file names before they were lost. However, getting the main content and some more rework in terms of renaming should not be a complain as much worth information has been restored.

Disk Defragmenter is a system utility provided by Windows for analyzing local logical drives, further locating and combining fragmented files and folders within blocks (clusters) of hard drive. You also can defrag logical drives from a command line using defrag command.

When we save a file it is divided in small stripes and saved on clusters, concerning the size of a cluster the number of fragments are created, for example to save a file of 16KB we need 4 clusters if the size of cluster to hold data is 4KB. Now it is not fixed that all these stripes would be saved in a contiguous fashion.

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Fault tolerance, using replication and redundancy to maintain data integrity, has evolved considerably since its inception and promises to continuously develop at an even clip. With data having taken over from hardware components as the backbone of the IT industry, data reliability is a key issue in today’s systems.

The concept of Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) aimed at ensuring data integrity has been around for some time now but, with rapid advancements being made in technology everyday, assumes greater significance today than at any other time. Progressive development in disk technologies coupled with reducing costs of hard disks has made RAID even more useful and prevalent in today’s IT scenario.

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Many individuals who are familiar with Linux file system would say “Ext3 does remove the Inode information of a file, and it is difficult to recover deleted data from Ext3 file system” when a normal data recovery application isn’t able to recover files then how a normal photo recovery application would be able to recover files from a Linux file system. Yes this is correct that Ext3 does remove the Inode information but it is quite easier to get the file out of ext2 (if we know more about file internals) to find out “bof” and “eof” of a specific file types (if it is stored contiguously). However recovery is still possible from ext3 in similar fashion.

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Data Recovery Software is very common word now, computer users around the world are aware that if data is lost there is a workaround to recover data. With the advent of new applications and computerization around the world, there is an exponential growth of information, and the ever-growing need of storage capacity. Per GB storage cost has decreased but data loss today still is a problem despite various techniques in place to safeguard data. Some of the techniques and policies implemented or planned today are:

a) Anti -Virus Software
b) NAS & SAN Storages having RAID (RISC based techniques).
c) Backups
d) Disaster management policy or Business continuity plans

They if implemented successfully would minimize the chances of data loss, however this is not the case, despite having these procedures and techniques enterprises are continuously facing data loss scenarios and there is nothing to mention about home user having a laptop or a standalone desktop PC is most vulnerable to loss of files due to accidental deletion, hardware or software malfunctions.

These options have various demerits, which obviously we are not going to discuss, rather we would try and evaluate disk recovery software, file recovery software, photo recovery software, media recovery software a whole lot of recovery applications around and would try and see how effective they are?

This website would highlight easy intuitive interface, data recovery tools that are designed not only to undelete accidentally deleted files or partitions but which recovers your data after accidental format of your drive, power failure, virus attack, software failure, or after deleting files, folders or partitions.