Are you a victim of accidental data deletion? Have you lost your valuable data due to a bout of malicious virus attack, power failure, or a hard drive crash? Don’t worry. Millions of computer users in the world suffer from unintentional data losses. While you can prevent accidental data loss through investments in hardware and data rescue tools, there are some free tools as well. These tools may not be as perfect as their commercial counterparts, but they do a decent job. In this article, we will explore some of these free data recovery tools and their modus operandi.
How they work
Remember this backdrop behind file deletion. Whenever your files are deleted, the data still resides on the hard drive. The only thing is that the operating system marks this space in the hard drive as free space. Your computer can write new data over that space. If you apply a data recovery tool prior to this writing, the data recovery process is likely to be easier. In case you format the drive, then the job will be much more difficult for the data recovery tool.
If you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7, or Windows Vista Ultimate/Business/Enterprise editions, the shadow copy feature might show you light of the day in case of data loss. A shadow copy creates scheduled copies of files that have changed from the last copy operation. For MAC users, the data rescue operation may not be fully free. You need to spend some extra bucks to get the Data Rescue II tool.
Though you might get some data rescue features packed with your operating system, there are many free data rescue software that do a better job. The modus operandi behind these tools is a process called data carving. This is a method of retrieving pre-defined file types based on internal characteristics, regardless of the operating system under which the file was written originally. The data recovery tool hunts for something called the “magic number”, or ‘magic bytes” in the file header, footer, or body. The magic number or magic byte is distinctive information that helps the tool to determine the file type. Once the file type is detected, the file can be recovered in its entirety. The above method of file recovery finds wide usage in forensic analysis. But a similar technique is used in the file recovery process as well.