How raw recovery works?

You must have heard for this term with many data recovery applications, “RAW” recovery. What exactly it means? Instead of a direct explanation of this term, it is mandatory for us to understand how it is related to data recovery.

FAT or NTFS are the two file systems that are supported by Microsoft Windows, FAT file system is dependent on file allocation tables, whereas NTFS depends on Master file tables called MFT. MFT and FAT holds the allocation information for a file or a folder. There are various sorts of situations, which may damage these file and folder allocation information. If this information is lost, there is no information for any data recovery software to locate the file.

The loss of this critical information is dangerous and as most of the data recovery companies are scratching there head for various ways to get lost data recovered, this method of performing raw scan came into existence. This is method which is the backbone of all file recovery applications, photo or music recovery software.

Therefore, it is extremely clear that when file system is completely damaged so that it is not possible to get the allocation for files, which are stored on the drive and there is no way to identify them. RAW recovery is extremely beneficial and pulling such files out of hard drives. RAW recovery for me should not be dependent on any file system as it works on unique file signatures (every file has a unique ID or signature).

Well the other most important part of file recovery of raw scan is in depth knowledge of the file type, by putting the signatures of all file types and giving a tentative size to look for will not be always successful. This in depth knowledge of file helps in identifying correct file size. Thus, the best file recovery software is the one that is able to identify a file using a signature and knows various other ways to get the file size.

In the end, the only limitation with file recovery would be recovery of files without the actual file names before they were lost. However, getting the main content and some more rework in terms of renaming should not be a complain as much worth information has been restored.