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
Files cannot be truly deleted, only overwritten. It’s more accurate to say that a hard drive cannot truly be empty, it has to always have some data. Free space in a disc is simply data you’re allowed to overwrite with other data. When you delete a file, all you’re doing is deleting the path to that data, which basically means that you’re giving the system permission to overwrite that data.
This is why the most critical aspect of data recovery is time. The longer a computer operates after the data is deleted, the more corrupted they become and ultimately fully disappear as they’ve been completely replaced. If you delete something critical and immediately start recovery you will recover it intact.
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