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
Computer memory consists of two important components: the actual data (stored as 1’s and 0’s) and an “index” or “table of contents” that links groups of 1’s and 0’s into “files.”
When a file sits on your desktop, that’s just a little blurb of information that says “when this gets double-clicked, read out the 1’s and 0’s from XYZ region of the memory”
Accordingly, there’s two ways of “deleting” a file:
* You could physically take all the 1’s and 0’s and write them all into 0’s.
* You could just delete the blurb that makes the computer know that a certain region of the memory corresponds to a real file
The first is time-intensive (takes a while), and is worse for the longevity of your memory especially with physical drives that have a limited number of times you can rewrite each 1 or 0.
The second is quick and easy because erasing the table of contents means the file is *essentially* gone. Then when you create a new file, the computer knows it can use that memory area for the new file and just write over whatever’s there. That way you aren’t constantly turning 1’s and 0’s into all-0’s and then back into 1’s and 0’s when you make new files, but rather you get fewer rewrites of the same memory.
However, importantly the second way also lets you re-access the data because it’s still technically there unless a new file has overwritten it. You could re-create the table of contents and say “hey computer tell me what used to be here” and it will give you the original data back because all you’re doing is re-accessing data the computer has “forgotten” about
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