Data recovery software/ file formats

[kalaharison]

Can data recovery software recover any file format/type (example .jpg/.xls/.word etc) or does certain data recovery software only recover certain file types)

Would data recovery software have to be able to read a certain file type to recover it or will it read/discover more obscure( specialised programs ) file types.

Thanks

 

[ponder]

Yes.

Always recover to a different physical drive or partition, never to the same partition you are trying to recover from.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Main_Page TestDisk & PhotoRec are awesome. GNU ddrescue is awesome for imaging drives with bad sectors etc.

 

[Grant]

take a look here as a starting point
http://lifehacker.com/5982339/diy-data-recovery-tricks-for-when-your-hard-drive-goes-belly-up

 

[HavocXphere]

Any files...it looks at the filesystem structure, not the files themselves.

I've done the recovery by file type thing though. Word, Excel & jpg files have distinct beginnings & ends, so one can write code to pull those off a raw image dump. Works surprisingly well...but decidedly less than perfectly.

 

[koeksGHT]

Download recuva, select scan all file types.

 

[kalaharison]

Thank you ,I will check those links out and see how it goes, thanks.