István F.
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Verified by
Adam B.
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Last updated:
August 13, 2024
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(0)
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.
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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