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Data restoration and Raw recovery method

When all bits of digital information are accurately retrieve from every live sector on the drive it is time to start reconstructing the logical stricture of drive in terms of files and folders by its original order created by operating system, used programs, and users.

Slightly damaged file system can be recovered with automated recovery tools and utilities.

Experienced data recovery engineers work with severely corrupted data images, rebuilding missed pieces of file structure manually, whenever it's possible.

In some exceptional cases with the big chunks of unrecoverable sectors on the drive, there is the last line of defense in the fight for the user data, so called Raw Recovery method. Raw recovery is the last resort and a hope in terms to see the user data after the catastrophic hard drive failure event.

The raw recovery is quite simple approach to recover under the hood. Let's say we need to recover a picture from a failed drive. A body of any computer digital file, for example a photo-picture, consists of sequence of HDD sectors (standard size of 512 bytes). Sometimes the sectors are ordered in one line, sometimes not - when not - then instead of one line we get a few pieces of shorter segments that are speeded all over the data disks.

The effect of spreading data among the whole drive is called the fragmentation and it is normal for the data distribution for fast working hard drive system in busy data traffic environment. However, for raw recovery method, fragmentation is the foe, as you can see below.

So, what is the raw recovery and how it works.

It is a well-known fact that each file - regardless the records in file system for particular operating system, has the unique identifier or header - few HEX-values unique for certain group of file types. For example, every JPG picture start with FF D8, MS document *.doc starts with D0, *.docx with 50.

Data recovery specialists continue developing the better algorithm in their automated tools in the order to extract as much user files as possible from the digital soup of disorderly raw data. Raw recovery gives the good result for retrieving lost pictures, documents, and other files, when no other method works. On contrary, the raw recovery loses the original names of files and folder trees, due to omission of the records about that in file body.

In general, raw recovery produces you up to 60% in saved data.

Examples of Raw Recovered Images