Formatting a drive in an attempt to wipe away your personal information is not a thorough and secure way of wiping a hard disk. This article shows how easy it is to recover data from formatted hard disks and the factors that affect full data recovery.
You can recover data from formatted drives quite simply using freeware if you wish. The steps involved are actually quite simple:
Download and install a data recovery application (for example, free options such as PC Inspectors Smart Recover).
Start up the application and select a drive (the formatted one) to analyze. These tools, no matter which one you go for, all operate in a similar way to this.
The program scans for data clusters on the disks memory, attempts to consolidate clusters from all over the disk in users’ files then presents you back a list of found files.
Pick the files you want and copy them to a new directory.
Even if you are formatting a drive then re-installing the operating system (OS) as a way of fixing computers then there will still be some original file remnants on the disk. Many of the OS system files will overwrite the original documents but a simple scan will still identify old documents in used clusters. Only in the event of formatting including a data wiping pass will the clusters be overwritten (usually with blank/useless data).
Each tool will return slightly different lists of files as the formatting process clears out the file allocation table (which stores the file to data clusters associations) meaning each tool needs to reassemble clusters like some kind of jigsaw puzzle. Some tools do this better than others.
If you want to stop people from being able recover data from formatted hard drives you own then you should use a data cleaning/cleansing tools to completely eradicate all data.
You can recover data from formatted drives quite simply using freeware if you wish. The steps involved are actually quite simple:
Download and install a data recovery application (for example, free options such as PC Inspectors Smart Recover).
Start up the application and select a drive (the formatted one) to analyze. These tools, no matter which one you go for, all operate in a similar way to this.
The program scans for data clusters on the disks memory, attempts to consolidate clusters from all over the disk in users’ files then presents you back a list of found files.
Pick the files you want and copy them to a new directory.
Even if you are formatting a drive then re-installing the operating system (OS) as a way of fixing computers then there will still be some original file remnants on the disk. Many of the OS system files will overwrite the original documents but a simple scan will still identify old documents in used clusters. Only in the event of formatting including a data wiping pass will the clusters be overwritten (usually with blank/useless data).
Each tool will return slightly different lists of files as the formatting process clears out the file allocation table (which stores the file to data clusters associations) meaning each tool needs to reassemble clusters like some kind of jigsaw puzzle. Some tools do this better than others.
If you want to stop people from being able recover data from formatted hard drives you own then you should use a data cleaning/cleansing tools to completely eradicate all data.
No comments:
Post a Comment