What kind of technology is this?

[Zyon]

Is anyone familiar with Undosoft? I saw a demo of the product and I was truly amazed. I have never seen a recovery system perform so fast! The hard disk was about 80% full. The person doing the demo deleted everything on the disk, copied several CDs to over write the previous contents, then deleted everything again, and restored the original disk in about 5 seconds. What kind of technology is this?

 

[ekÆsine]

disk/ data recovery software. it isn't as amazing as you think. i think the general idea works like winXP restore points. it makes a copy of the partition/ boot table (not sure the technical term) which holds information about where the files are on your hard disk.

when something is overwritten the data is still buried under many layers. i think you can restore data up to 7 or 8 times being overwritten. it is like a table of contents and doesn't take up much space so thats why it takes only seconds to restore it.

the catch is if no backups were made previously this software is useless to fix data loss.

 

[Zyon]

Thanks for you response, I am familiar with those programs and you are right. But this undosoft thing is really confusing. I tried it myself I deleted as much of XP as I could even a few files that should stop XP from booting. With XP still running I made 40 folders numbered them from 1 to 40. I copied a 400 meg CD the folder 1 them copied the contents of folder 1 to the other 39 folders which is more than 50% of my 20 gig drive. I rebooted the computer XP rebuilt the necessary files and the computer rebooted. So I know that the disk was almost full. Then I activated the undosoft thing the system rebooted and all the original files were back in about 5 seconds the system was not missing anything! What is going on? How is this is possible?

Now you see why I am confused!

Z

 

[Bleep]

I bet if you used a data overwriting program (that uses Guttmann and pseudorandom data overwriting), you wouldn't be able to restore the files.

BTW, I wouldn't recommend testing my theory, as you may lose data and have a non-functional operating system.

 

[ekÆsine]

Zyon if you do a full format of your hard disk 10 times that would make sure you cannot recover your lost data. you can retreive data that has been overitten up to 8-10 times roughly.

there are programs that can recover lost files using this method. there are also programs that overwrite with garbage 10 times to make sure data can't be recovered. here is some of them:

http://www.cyberscrub.com/cybercide/overview/

http://www.cyberwalker.net/columns/may00/110500.html

http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecovery/