Data Recovery Weekly

Some new technologies have side effects which decrease data redundancy. Such technologies are: NTFS compression Windows Vista/7 vs. Windows NT/2000/XP complete format TRIM on SSDs ZFS deduplication Initially, the effect of decreasing redundancy is unnoticeable, but once the technology becomes popular, the unintended consequences appear. Volume-level NTFS compression never became widespread among home users. As Windows Vista and then Windows 7 become widespread, the number of cases when data is lost irreversibly due to reinstallation increased. You can recover some data after XP reinstallation, but not after Vista/7 reinstallation with a complete format. SSDs with TRIM are not widespread enough (yet) to notice that data recovery software does not properly work with them. As for ZFS-based NASes, then on the one hand they are not widespread among the home users, on the other hand - even the first installations did not yet reach the end of their service life.

If you start to format the hard drive and then find out that it is the wrong drive , press "Cancel" immediately, and then go for the reset button (if your computer has it). If you do not have a reset button, keep in mind that a power button has a five second delay before the shutdown occurs. Wall socket plug may be a better option. There is a significant technical difference between Quick and Complete format , but we'd rather discuss the timings for now. If you are doing a quick format , most likely pressing "Cancel" and reset would be of no use because you do not have time for it, but you should try anyway. In case of a complete format (with Windows Vista or Windows 7, which actually overwrite the data during the format) on the FAT filesystem the file allocation table is lost very quickly and then folders are progressively lost. Loss of the allocation table makes subsequent unformat attempts difficult and causes the loss of all the fragmented files. Further l...