Overwritten Data

Is overwritten data recoverable?

Data which has been overwritten can not be recovered.

The internet offers much information & help on this advice which is misleading or plain wrong, data which has had a single pass of new data can not be recovered to its original from.

Data stored on hard drive media is stored in a magnetic form in a specific logical to physical location following new data being encoded to the exact area it completely destroys the old pattern of data, there is no 'ghost image' or underlying data, only the new pattern.

Due to the nature and mechanics of hard drive media it can be possible that the placement of the new data pattern may be marginally placed to the left or right of the old image so to speak, however there is not enough data from the old image to decode, moreover if there were the procedure would be prohibitive to complete.

Overwritten data is totally unrecoverable.

Clients do run into this failure type such as when the media has been reloaded with the Operating system, however there are some possibilities here to recover an amount of data, the full recovery would not be possible.

The key to a recovery in this type of overwritten data is based on the following;

When did the overwite take place?

What has been involved in recovering it to date such as easily available data recovery programs?

Was the media ghosted or partitioned in some way?

The answers to this can help our engineers determine whether there are any chances for a recovery or not.

Please contact us today for advice and solutions for overwritten data