So i was enjoying some down time for myself the other night taking a nice warm bath and letting my mind wander when i suddenly recalled a time when i worked at a research station and some idiot managed to somehow delete over 3000 excel spreadsheets worth of recently collected data. I was charged with recovering the data and scanning through everything to make sure it was ok and nothing deleted…must have spent nearly 2 weeks scanning through endless pages…and it just barely dawned on me to wonder…exactly…how the hell do data recovery tools collect “lost data”???
I get like a general idea of like how as long as like that “save location” isnt written over with new data, then technically that data is still…there???? I…thats as much as i understand.
Thanks much appreciated!
And for those wondering, it wasnt me, it was my first week on the job as the only SRA for that station and the person charged with training me for the day…i literally watched him highlight all the data, right click, and click delete on the data and then ask “where’d it all go?!?”
In: Technology
Consider an address book that you have for all your friends. It has the address details of all your friends meaning you know how to find them.
Now imagine you tear a page and throw it in the trash, or maybe you loose your whole address book. That doesn’t necessarily mean your friends all cease to exist. They are still there, you just don’t know how to find them. This is how an operating system deletes files, by tearing their address information from the address book. In this case your friends are files on the disk.
Now imagine you really need to talk to A friend called John, but you accidentally tore and trashed John’s info from your address book a while back. You can still somehow contact John by contacting mutual friends and worst case look through each house in the city where John lives. This is how data recovery tools find deleted files, by clever mathematics or worst case brute force through the entire data in the disk.
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