There are so many things that everyone needs to worry about in life, but we believe that data loss shouldn’t be one of them. Still, the novel sitting on your Mac or the family photos that weren’t downloaded from a digital camera and printed as part of a photo book all require a storage medium to keep onto them until they finally materialize as a printed book or framed picture. As such, storage mediums have become an integral part of our digital lives, whether our files are stored on internal or external hard or solid-state drives, or in SD cards and flash drives. There is an aching point, though. Just as a document is lost in the physical world, digital files can disappear from storage mediums, too, thanks accidental deletion, drive formatting, a disk’s failure, and more. It’s at these points that data recovery software can help.
If you have ever experienced the moment when your Time Machine drive failed, then you already know what it means to lose the work of a lifetime or important files. No one wants that, and it’s an issue that CleverFiles’ Disk Drill Pro addresses. Thanks to its support for a continuously growing variety of file types and signatures, the data recovery software is very effective on hard drives and can even narrow down the scan results using its neat filters. The company behind the Atlanta, U.S.-based 508 Software takes a clever approach to customers looking for data recovery software: Disk Drill can be downloaded for macOS and Windows for free to check whether the files you are searching for are recoverable. It’s only if this is the case that you are then invited to upgrade to a lifetime license for $89.
Whether it is data lost from an internal or external hard drive, a Windows Boot Camp partition, or Apple Time Capsule, Stellar Mac Data Recovery will help you get it back. The small but powerful software helps to locate and recover information from corrupted, damaged, or deleted volumes on any common format drive. Developed by Stellar Information Technology, an India-based company founded in 1993, the Stellar Mac Data Recovery application completes the developer’s line of repair and recovery software for Mac, which includes Stellar Data Recovery for iPhone and Stellar JPEG Repair. Although there is still much to do before it is perfected, Stellar Mac Data Recovery Professional is a powerful utility that scans your attached and built-in drives for free, though it isn’t until paying the $99 for a license that the recovery of lost partitions, documents, and multimedia files is enabled.
There are times in life when even a solid mobile operating system such as iOS may act up, and in such moments you may face the pain of losing valuable data on your mobile device. Everything is fine if an iTunes or iCloud backup is at hand, but what about the devices that weren’t ever backed up? UK-based Enigma Digital’s data recovery software is available for both Mac and PC, making it one of the many options that users have in such situations. The company claims it has recovered more than 1 billion items, helping 100,000 users in more than 200 countries. The free version of Enigma Recovery works for 14 days and if you are satisfied with the capabilities of the software, then a lifetime license can be bought for as low as $19.99 – a purchase that is protected by Enigma’s 30-day money-back guarantee.
The success of a data recovery scenario depends on multiple factors and in fact the operating system in use is one of them. Each OS uses a proprietary file system that maps the physical drive and creates a logical drive – in other words a digital abstraction of the physical hardware – that the desktop OS is capable of reading.
While the algorithm used by data recovery software doesn’t differ much between Windows and a macOS, there are tiny things that make a difference such as support of code, which here means file types that the software is able to recognize and reconstruct based on the code it finds on the hard drive. When comparing solutions for the same OS, users would be smart to first check the number of supported file types, its advanced filtering options, and preview functionality, features that are lifesavers when it comes to data recovery.
Macs run on an Apple-developed operating system, macOS (formerly OS X), which uses one of two proprietary file systems: either HFS/HFS+ for older systems or APFS on modern Macs running High Sierra or later. Windows systems cannot read or write to these file systems, though Macs are able to do so on drives using Microsoft’s proprietary file systems (such as FAT, exFAT, and so on).
When users install an operating system onto a computer or an external hard drive, the OS first needs to format that drive meaning that it has to map and create a logical disk of a file system that it is able to read and write to. This is an automated process and users won’t have to deal with it unless they are formatting an external drive to make it macOS compatible.
Every file a user saves on the storage medium is actually a string of binary data that is given a logical address, which is stored in a reference table that the operating system reads each time a user wants to access a file. With HFS+ this special table is the catalog file and it details the folder and file hierarchy of the volume, containing data about each file and its location on the logical disk, among lots of other important information that the file system needs.
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