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
Hard drives are like books: There’s a table of contents pointing to which chapter has the right information. When you retrieve a file, it looks at the table of contents, finds out what page the information is on, then goes to that page.
When you delete a file, it only deletes the entry in the table of contents. When you look for the file in the table of contents, it won’t be there, so it’s like it’s deleted. However, if you actually go through the pages, that information is still there.
Data recovery for deleted files usually involve going through every page and seeing what’s there.
If you truly want to “delete” and erase all information about the file, you would have to write over those pages. Lots of software will let you do this but it’s usually quite time consuming.
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