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In-depth technology research: finding new ways to recover data, accessing firmware, writing programs, reading bits off the platter, recovering data from dust.

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Please do not post questions about data recovery cases here (use this forum instead). This forum is for topics on finding new ways to recover data. Accessing firmware, writing programs, reading bits off the platter, recovering data from dust...
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Question on Recovery

November 26th, 2016, 12:12

This may be a very stupid question, but I'm unable to find the answer elsewhere..

How is it that I am able to recover over 1 TB of information on a 64GB Flash Drive?

Re: Question on Recovery

November 26th, 2016, 13:28

First we should make a distinction between usable data and garbage. You can't recover more usable data than there is storage space. For example, lets take a flash drive that is formatted NTFS; Your recovery software could read the MFT and see thousands of deleted files and it knows where they "used" to exist. It might let you recover those deleted files by name but many will just be garbage since the space they used to exist in is now used by other files. In theory there could be one hundred 5GB files that used to exist in the same 5GB of space but they have been deleted over time. In that case your recovery software could claim 500GB of recoverable data but you will get 1 good 5GB file. Some recovery software can distinguish between valid files and corrupt files and allow you to separate them during the recovery process, or skip them all together. I hope that helps answer the question.

Re: Question on Recovery

November 27th, 2016, 14:57

Often files are also corrupt with regard to their size, sometimes with outrageous sizes that don't make sense. Dependent on the software used, you could filter out those files by size parameters.
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