A friend of mine gave me a CD with a number of pictures and personal documents on it and asked if I could recover the data from it. The data is stored on a CD ROM that was backed up using a proprietary Sony backup program. I have no other information on the particular backup program other than it is Sony, because one of the files on the CD ROM has "Sony Emergency Backup" on it. The disk is about 3.5 GB in size, but the disk only displays some .ini files and a few text files that amount to about a few kilobytes in size. It is obvious that the backup program obfuscates the data and only shows some supporting files. I have tried using multiple forensic scanning tools to create an image of the disk. I used FTK Imager and a few others, but the disk fails after 80% of the job is done. Does anyone know of a good solution to recover data if the data was stored using a proprietary backup tool and you don't know what it is? Thanks for any assistance.

Jonathan

CD or DVD, 3.5GB or 3.5MB?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Could the Sony emergency backup be a backup disk created by a laptop by the vendor tools, such as the ones you are prompted to create when setting up for first use?

I cant recall any Sony backup software used for random backup.

There is however plenty of Phones that backup to various media, and Sony would have its own versions.
http://www.recovery-android.com/sony-backup-and-restore-application.html

or that comes with external hard disks:
http://www.sony.net/Products/memorycard/en_as/hdd/software/index.html

IMHO, your friend should be able to give you at least something more, if he knows whats on it, he should be able to say how the files came to be written there.

maybe investigate his PC for software or see if the PC is a Sony.. or..?

can you do a dir /a /s of the DVD? the filenames may jog the memory of a member here.

Thank you all for the assistance. After multiple attempts at imaging and data carving this DVD and only getting a bunch on .ini and .exe files I finally came to the conclusion that what my friend had given me was a disk for an actual recovery program and not a "recovery disk." This was my suspicion right from the get-go but I wanted to do some examination myself first.

haha.. friends.. who needs enemies, right?

he found it wasn't a backup he had.

what is your files list like? did you actually read this thread..

if your DVD drive is d: then go to a command prompt, type dir \a \s > c:\dvd-list.txt then check that list for any personally Identifiable info. If none found, post the contents of the text file in c:\dvd-list.txt

Wow ,
Which DOS Version Was Used By You First Time Sir .This Kinda Commands Are Only Knows To The DOS Breed [ Me Too Used It for Many Many Years ] .

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Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com

I think it was a special version of DOS 2 or 2.1 for the Tandy TRS-80 Model 2000. Has an 80186 processor I say "has" because I still have it!