Altirium Data Recovery Blog

Archive for June 29th, 2009

The recovery of data files that have been deleted is not always a matter of competence, to a great extent success is governed by the file system in use and how busy the system has been since the deletion.

Windows NTFS, for example, marks a file as deleted but until the MFT entry is reused all of the file’s allocation information is still present. Other systems clear some or all of a file’s allocation information as soon as there is deletion, which is why the recovery of deleted files from heavily fragmented FAT file systems is such a nightmare.

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With the volume of data being stored doubling every 18 months, and the possibility of increased regulation in the financial sector following the recent debacle possibly tightening all areas including data retention and data availability, how best to secure data for the long term?

In our data recovery business we are seeing an increase in hard drive recovery work from disk based backup systems. “We don’t use tape anymore” being the gist of many a statement on the subject of backup strategy, “disk based systems are so much more easy to use, and recovering the data is less arduous”. This much is true, disk based storage systems can be on-line permanently, de-duplication can be used to reduce the volume of extraneous data, and down time caused by accidental file deletion or local system failure can be kept to a minimum.

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