Talk:Data recovery

message: This is just a suggestion, but shouldn't this article's name be changed to edata recovery, since it deals with data stored in electronic format, which is generally referred to as edata? This way, it wouldn't be confused with such forensic processes as recovery of hard, physical data.
--Novena
:*Most data recovery sites advertise themselves as "data recovery" not "edata recovery."  Also, in the digital forensic community, it is called "data recovery" so I disagree that it is "generally referred to as edata." Wikiwikikid (talk) 13:27, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Some use as e.g users account 41.114.237.184 (talk) 07:30, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: Name Confusion

message: I was wondering why linking to a forum discussing data recovery methods would be deemed wrong by an administrator whereas a barely related whitepaper on whether security services can read straight from a platter is ok? I thought external links to related resources that provided further reading for those interested was what WP was all about? Please don't say the great Wikipedia is going the same way as DMOZ?
: This page tends to get a lot of spammers posting links to their sites here. The consensus of those who keep an eye on this page seems to be that external links to things that aren't clear, unbiased advice aren't okay. So, that probably explains some of the zealousness in reverting. I took a look at the forum you linked and, IMHO, it seems rather self-promoting to post a link to it in this article. It's a small board with little notability, basically, and notability is one of the factors many Wikipedia editors use to decide what stays and what goes. --FreelanceWizard 17:12, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I can appreciate what you're saying. If there had been a link to a similar resource that was more notable then I wouldn't have bothered. But I was linking to a resource that would be useful to many who would read this article rather than shamelessly promoting it. The forum is relatively new, but has helped people already who were looking for independant advice or just want to research the subject. However, as the editor(s), you have the last say and I respect that. Keep up the good work! --John 09:50, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I think that having links or text pertaining to the pioneers of the data recovery industry is highly relevant in this article, even more so considering a lot of them have further information on their websites.  If companies like Kroll Ontrack can be listed when there are companies with more to offer, why are they getting pulled instead? (Z)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.8.255.254 (talk) 16:34, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: 173.8.255.254, your link violates WP:ELNO #5, which is why it is being removed.  It doesn't provide any additional information, and doesn't reliably verify any information given, the sole purpose of that website is to sell a service. - SudoGhost™ 17:35, 25 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Relevance of External Links

message: "Recent state of the art data recovery methodologies are discussed at Recovering Unrecoverable Data a whitepaper by ActionFront Data Recovery."
I'm not sure that this is a good thing to link. Yes, it is free to get, but that's an indirect link; you have to ask for the paper in order to get it. Thoughts? --FreelanceWizard 7 July 2005 20:31 (UTC)
Thoughts (from a "biased" source ... I work for ActionFront)
The entire text of the white paper is posted on the page linked-to.
We used the email to track who actually gets the full-version of the paper - a small price to pay for the most definitive document on hard drives and data recovery that can be found anywhere! ...Ron Austin
: I'm not sure that everyone would agree with that, as it sounds, no offense, like it's a means to collect e-mail addresses for the marketing department (the common term for that, and other links to sites, is "link spam," though I'm not sure I agree with such an condemnation here). I'm sure the paper's a useful source, though. Anyway, on my next edit, I'm going to drag some of the current inline links down to an external links section, which would include both that link, the links to the other companies, and the link to Runtime Software. The whole article, now that I've read it again, seems a little too commercialized for my tastes. ;) --FreelanceWizard 11:15, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: External links to corporate sites are always a tricky, delicate thing. Anyway, I think the article's substantially less commercial now, and I didn't see any reason to exclude the link to your whitepaper; perhaps someone could use it as a source to expand the section on physical recovery. I'm sure you can understand that, with all sorts of companies trying to sneak themselves in wherever they can (there are many examples easily found on, say, Votes for Deletion), there's always a bit of skepticism when an edit appears from an anonymous user that only adds an external link to a corporate site. It does seem your intentions were pure, so there are no hard feelings, I hope? :) --FreelanceWizard 21:19, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

text: *thumbs up* Good choice of external links there. I definitely agree that the commercial links were getting a bit... much. I'm not opposed to one or two just to give people a feel as to what's available out there, but I think you've got a point that there was a nasty precedent starting. So, good call, good work, nice catch, etc. ;) --FreelanceWizard 10:20, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: yes, this  link was pretty useful for me. Altough I couldn´t recover the data (yet) I already checked the drive with Testdisk (definitly worth an article) and the boot sector is at least ok! Anyway I give the linked article four out of five stars for noobs :) --MilesTeg 01:01, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Linking to external articles, sites and software

message: There seems to be some IT industry confusion as to the different specific definitions of "recovering”, "salvaging" or “rescuing” of data. Corporations such as IBM, SUN, HP, Sungard, Ironmoutain and others define "data recovery" as the process of "accessing and retrieving data from network storage devices" while other organizations and companies like Ontrack, DriveSavers and Dataleach who specialize in the niche market of rescuing data from failed storage disk drives and computeing devices also have coined such services and products as "Data Recovery". --WikEditor 17:28, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: All the references I've seen from academic circles (including Tanenbaum) refer to recovering data from a failed file system as "data recovery." It's never been suggested to me by anyone that "data recovery" is synonymous with "data mining" (which is what I think you're describing). On the other hand, continuous data protection is a type of backup, and backups are related to data recovery. Anyway, my intuition is that what we're seeing is IBM et al. trying to recast the term for advertising reasons, everyone else be damned. Still, it might be useful to add another section to this page describing the difference. --FreelanceWizard 23:05, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Salvage data versus data recovery?

message: There is an stub article on Magnetic Force Scanning Tunneling Microscopy, which claims that overwritten data can be recovered with current methods after "1000 overwrites". I find this claim dubious (to say the least!), and have tagged this latter article for cleanup. Please contribute to the discussion on that article if you know anything about MFSTM.
Mtford 08:44, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Contradiction with "[[MFSTM]]" article 

message: From the article: "This claim, although theoretically possible to some extent, is today little more than a myth. The reason for this is that the method described above would, if possible, read remnants of magnetic information on the media. Taking into account that the time to read and interpret the remnants would be considerable even for a small drive (several years) and that several "previous" bits would not be able to be read correctly, it will create a time consuming and probabilistically impossible puzzle to solve."
This appears to be straight from the website of talking out of your ass. Where is the proof? [UNSIGNED]
:It's not possible to prove that something can't be done, only to prove that it can.  There is no proof that overwritten data can be recovered from modern hard drives, but there is evidence to the fact that it can't.  
:Here is a link to and an excerpt from an article posted bt Seagate Recovery Services, a data recovery company owned and operated by the hard drive manufacturer Seagate:
:http://www.actionfront.com/ts_dataremoval.aspx
:(Starting with the third paragraph under the heading, "CAN OVERWRITTEN DATA BE RECOVERED?"
::It has been suggested that an electron microscope could be used to read and interpret any patterns that were not fully overwritten by the process. Theoretically this can be done - but in practice it is little more than a myth.
::...In conclusion, overwritten data cannot be read back or recovered by any current disk drive technology or laboratory technique.
:Here is a link to an article by the National Bureau of Economic Research in which the conclusion reached is that:
:: "Gutmann's claim [that overwritten data can be recovered by reading the edges of the tracks] belongs in the category of urban legend."
:http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-guttman.html
:In that same article, it is noted about Gutmann's paper that:
:: "it may be in the category of marketing hype. I note that it is being used to sell a software package called 'The Annililator'."
:It may be important to note that there are many true stories of data that was thought to have been overwritten being recovered.  The key phrase here is "thought to have been."  In many cases of "overwritten" data, the data wasn't actually overwritten.Webgrunt 22:02, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Common misconceptions. 

message: There is no information given on where to find the procedures for recovering data from a drive with physical damage, such as crashed heads or surface damage.  After a quick Google search, I found several companies offering the service, but nothing on the actual procedures or equipment needed.  A link to details of the process of recovery would be a great addition to the article.  Anyone?  VietGrant 23:17, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm pretty sure some of the companies provide a little bit of info on what they do. They at least mention that they used clean rooms Nil Einne 16:00, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Physical Damage 

message: I work for a data recovery company.  I respect Wikipedia.  I had checked the data recovery pages here a few times.  Finally one time I noticed that my company was added to a list of companies.  It had gone on the list with a bunch of others apparently and now they were in alphabetical order.  I do not know who did it, but it was nice to see my company on there.  Now I find the page is deleted.List_of_data_recovery_software
There is a lot of complaining above about the advertising from data recovery companies appearing on the data recovery pages, notably the List_of_data_recovery_software page which is now gone.  I did not see the argument about the ActionFront white paper but all I saw was a bunch of links at the bottom for some data recovery companies in a well defined section.  This did not strike me as a negative thing.  Sure, in a way it may be advertising, but it was also a helpful way to show people that companies like that exist.  When someone has a hard drive problem or what have you and need their data, they probably don't know any data recovery companies at all and it may be an emergency.  Wikipedia could be a place they might go for a little research.  They might not have known that such companies exist at all.  Those links therefore would have helped that particular person in addition to helping the data recovery companies.
There are zillions of examples of advertising on Wikipedia so I don't know how you can crush this one.  Look at this page Comparison_of_instant_messaging_clients.  Not only are there a ton of IM clients listed but they have huge grid breakdowns of features and they even have their own dedicated pages on Wikipedia!!!  Those pages have direct links to the IM client's website.  I don't know how you can say this is different.  Actually it is far more abusive than a few links at the bottom of an article if you see things that way.  Some are "free" but there are $25 IM clients, Adware supported IM clients, subscription based IM clients.  So I ask the community here to be fair and allow some page with some sort of listing of data recovery companies/services/software etc. for everyone's benefit.
Thank you. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 12.10.116.131 (talk) 23:43, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No company should be on the list unless it has its own Wikipedia article.  No company should have a Wikipedia article without being corporate notability guidelines.  That's all there is to it.  If you have any questions you should ask at WP:TEAHOUSE. - Julietdeltalima (talk) 17:34, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why the backlash against data recovery companies? 

message: Is "Zero-knowledge analysis" the same as "data carving"? A quick look suggests that they are, but as I'm no expert I'm not going to edit this. Anyway, I found this informative PDF, which might be linked to or used as a reference. Morenoodles (talk) 11:07, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: "Zero-knowledge analysis"

message: After someone else had asked for a citation supporting this assertion, I tried to source it but couldn't so I removed it. Please do not reinsert without citation or consensus discussion here on the talk page. Thanks. Untrue Believer (talk) 03:16, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Removed "Far more common than physical damage is logical damage to a file system."

message: After seeing a number of spam reversions for this item , something needs to be done here. In the same sentence, DCFLdd is provided with an external link to its site, so it would seem HDClone would deserve the same.  The question, though, is which HDClone?  There seems to be a commercial product with a free version here, and an open source product with the same name here.  Which is the HDClone referred to in this page?  Whichever one, the link should be there, IMO. Rurik (talk) 12:18, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I disagree that HDClone should be included.  If anything the DCFLdd should be taken out if it is "spammy" (which I don't think it is).  It would appear that DCFLdd is NOT a commercial app anyways.  It's a free, government-created app.  I don't see what value there would be for them to spam it.  Also, see Defense Cyber Crime Center.  Apparently DCFLdd was developed at DC3. Wikiwikikid (talk) 13:35, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: There may be something to removing all of the inline links, then, such as with DCFLdd.  I'd like to add that DCFLdd was originally developed at DC3, but is now maintained by an outside person. DC3dd is the newer version that is maintained by DC3.  I'll make a few copyedits based on all this. Rurik (talk) 14:35, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: HDClone

message: FileSalvage for Mac OS X can find data after a hard disk has been formatted, regardless of format. Sierraoffline444 (talk) 20:57, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  FileSalvage 

message: I'm personally in the even a single pass is probably enough and no one has shown otherwise camp. Even so Data recovery#Overwritten data currently uses  which while interesting is something I don't like. As Guttman  and others have pointed out, the authors don't seem to understand there is a big difference between an magnetic force microscope and an electron microscope. As a blog, and from someone who doesn't seem to be a recognised expert in a field (as opposed to Guttman, who appears to be), I would personally suggest we can throw it out. The bigger problem is the actual paper  also seems to think a magnetic force microscope is an electron microscope. As a published paper it's harder for us to discard. Even so, personally I'm still reluctant to use it, it's conference proceedings published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science and while I don't know how widely regarded this is in the computer science field, I presume it's not peer reviewed (at least I hope not otherwise it doesn't say much of the peer review). Even if we do use the paper, I think we have to word the section carefully. Another problem highlighted by Guttman is that his paper was from 1996 and was referring to techniques and encodings used at the time. The paper doesn't seem to make this distinction. Guttman himself has said (before the paper was published) that he doesn't think recovery is likely with modern HDDs and he repeated this after the paper was published. Nil Einne (talk) 18:35, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: There's a much better paper on recovering overwritten data from modern drives here: http://tomcoughlin.com/Techpapers/Secure%20Erase%20Article%20for%20IDEMA,%20042502.pdf .  It reaches the same conclusion that one pass is sufficient, but the authors actually seem to know what they're doing (check out their bios at the bottom of the pdf).  They describe spin-stand experiments to recover both overwritten data and track edge data.  This paper seems like a much better source than the SANS paper. Lylekone (talk) 19:46, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Data recovery#Overwritten data]] 

message: There are so many data recovery softwares all over the world. All data recovery softwares(Commercial, shareware, freeware) are alike. The follows list the same point.
    1.Select a recovery mode to begin the recovery wizard. Generally divided into ‘Quick Scan‘,‘Full Scan‘,‘Complete Scan‘,‘Partition Scan‘,‘RAW recovery‘,etc.
    2.List the disks/partitions and let you select one to scan if you know the lost files location. But some softwares may ask you some questions about the lost files location, types, etc or support advance mode for professional users.
    3.Scan the selected disk/partitions/special folder to find the lost files. If you can not find the lost files, some softwares may prompt you use another long scan time mode. The scan time may have a big gap according to different design mechanism.
    4.Show the scan results with left tree and right list mode. Some friendly GUI support types tree, time tree or split-window mode. Such as recover my files, data trace recovery, etc.
    5.Preview the files and find your lost files, then select a location to save the recover result. Most softwares can preview pictures, texts, and hex. But few can preview zip, rar, pdf, some types of audios and videos, such as EasyRecovery from Ontrack company, Data Trace Recovery from DataToUS company, wondershare data recovery.
    6.Show recovery progress and names, used times, then give a recovery report,and location links. It will show you how many files succeed and failed. Then you can click the link to find the recovered files to confirm.
   The procedure also applies to card recovery softwares, photo recovery softwares, format recovery softwares.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by PinYiBa (talk • contribs) 03:05, 21 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is the same process about mainly data recovery softwares? 

message: Should have some information about the commonly-recommended DIY things like freezing the drive etc and what actually happens when you do this.  Wikipedia is the antidote to rumors/urban legends.
http://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=20957&start=20  http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/freezing-hdd-t4042248.html etc 71.167.66.210 (talk) 14:08, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Freezing etc 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
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*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20121127130830/https://www.anti-forensics.com/disk-wiping-one-pass-is-enough-part-2-this-time-with-screenshots/ to https://www.anti-forensics.com/disk-wiping-one-pass-is-enough-part-2-this-time-with-screenshots/
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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Merge in:
* Data recovery hardware
* Data recovery software
* List of data recovery software
Four clearly notable topics. But data recovery is poor and the others are far worse.
Data recovery hardware says nothing. What article content there is (two sentences?) is hidden behind a pile of muda.
Data recovery software is just a redirect - but it ought to redirect here
List of data recovery software fails WP:NOTDIR. It's nothing more than a list of commercial products, with no encyclopaedic discussion of the topic or each entry. We're not here to be a directory, and we're bad at being an up-to-date one. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:43, 28 September 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Seems reasonable to merge into Data recovery, given the limited development of content in the other articles. Dl2000 (talk) 02:49, 5 February 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bulk merge 

message: Two paragraphs could possibly be removed to clean up this article: "Four phases of data recovery" reads like a guide, and "Restore disk" is possibly unrelated to the topic. What do you think? Savvygnome (talk) 01:07, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not a manual