Category Archives: data recovery

RAW file recovery and duplicates

Recovery is resulting in duplicate photos One of the drawbacks of ‘raw recovery’ is that generally files are recovered with auto generated meaningless filenames. To conclusively identify files you have to open them although initial culling can be done by sorting by size, or with help of a tool that can sort files by creation date,… Read More »

Some thoughts on signature based file recovery

But first, file system based recovery I am A ‘Windows person’ and deal with data recovery on file systems that were for the most part designed by Microsoft. As a consequence I can predict with reasonable certainty the chances of successful data recovery after you formatted your NTFS drive. Because I understand what such a… Read More »

Everything you always wanted to ask a data recovery pro but were afraid to.

This post is just a quick pointer to a new Reddit sub created by several data recovery professionals; r/AskADataRecoveryPro. Reddit is an internet discussion / social media platform where all kinds of topics are discussed. These topics are in separate ‘sub-reddits’. Anyone can easily create a sub-reddit. People who post on Reddit are referred to… Read More »

What makes photo and video recovery challenging?

Photo recovery challenges are often related to small flash based drives Most cases that land on my desk arrive as photo or video repair tasks. As I have stated before, many of those are the result of botched recovery jobs, or corruption is caused by a file system or physical issue with the drive. Also,… Read More »

USB Flash drive not detected after fall

Will a USB flash drive survive a drop? Modern USB Flash drives are quite solid and will most likely survive a fall due to their monolithic design. Older USB keys typically consist of several components micro soldered to a flimsy PCB. Apart from the smaller chip (the controller) and the large chip (NAND flash memory),… Read More »

USB flash drive keeps freezing / disconnecting – Recover Data

A USB flash drive constantly freezing and disconnecting is most likely a sign of degraded NAND. NAND has a finite number of erase/write cycles, the cheaper the NAND used, the smaller this number is. Also certain conditions can lower the number, such as the drive being exposed to heat.  Despite numerous sites recommending you run… Read More »

If photos can be recovered, I will.

In several places on this website I make the bold claim that I may recover your photos even if: File recovery or photo recovery software does not. File or photo recovery software recovers corrupt photos. Other labs can’t or recover corrupt files … Of course this is a claim you should not take my word… Read More »

When DIY data recovery is not a good idea ..

What’s wrong with using (DIY) data recovery software to recover data from an ‘unstable drive’? By unstable drive, I mean a drive that has problems delivering the data due to underlying physical problems. Physical problems that potentially get worse due to stressing the drive. Reduce stress on drive So, first goal is to reduce stress.… Read More »

Recover photos from a hard drive

When choosing the best photo recovery software it’s important to consider from what type of drive you need to recover from. To recover photos from a hard drive, in 9 out of 10 cases generic file recovery software will do better, give less fuzz and be quicker than specialized photo recovery software. In advance: SSD… Read More »

Recovering data from an unstable flash drive

Recovering data from an unstable flash drive often proves to be a lot harder than recovering data that was lost due to deletion or accidental formatting. This is due to the fact that data recovery software is written to address issues at the ‘data level’ while often instability issues are at the ‘disk level’. What… Read More »