Data Recovery from External HDD which has been over written

[ishwinderjauhar]

Hi
i wanted to know if there is a software or data recovery company which can recover .mov files from an external 1tb wd elements hard disk.
Would appreciate any leads/suggestions.
Regards

[fzabkar]

PhotoRec?

[Kum Ruzvelt]

Overwritten data can not be recovered.

[digitalferret]

"overwritten"

my simplified understanding of it -

drive totally overwritten, ie secure erase cycle, no recovery possible.

drive part overwritten but file table / fragments found: possible recovery of entire file (possible drop out in parts) if the data still resides in situ on disk.

drive part overwritten ie quick format / file table corrupt / deleted files and drive used again:
maybe as fzabkar mentioned photorec or others that can search for residual data (file carving) and reconstruct files from headers and footers.

File Carving and Fragmentation:

.avi files for instance, will usually return something from the file header going forwards until the data are corrupt. part file recovered.
So even with fragmented files you may get the first portion of the movie, and maybe more if the footer is also found.

.mov files (and others) will often not show any view-able material even if you get the file header and an amount of contiguous data going forward.


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