Does Reformatting of Storage Media Incur Permanent Data Loss? A Comprehensive Analysis
From the perspective of a user, data on a hard drive is completely lost once you reformat the drive.
This takes us to the old core belief that if something is invisible, it does not exist.
Let us quickly relate these two statements and shed some light on common misconceptions that surround reformatting of hard drives.
Reformatting is a kind of high-level format of a hard drive.
A high-level format differs from low-level format in that the former is performed on a functioning drive to erase its contents and create a new file system, while the latter prepares the drive for initial use.
Once the empty file system is created on the drive or volume after reformatting, you can store new data on this medium.
One thing that remains obscure is what happened to the contents of the drive after reformatting.
Reformatting and Data Loss The process of reformatting removes all contents of the medium.
However, this claim is true only to some extent.
This process is performed by the operating system, so it may differ from one operating system to other.
Typically, reformatting enables the drive to free up its contents and mark the space as 'available' for use by other data.
The data that existed on the drive before reformatting manages to be still there with its original format intact.
However, this data remains invisible to the operating system, and thus to the user.
This means that there is a good chance of recovering this data even after reformatting the drive.
Data Recovery after Reformatting The process of reformatting is much like deletion where your data is not fully erased.
Instead, the space occupied by this data is marked as available for reuse.
As the data is still present in its original place, it can be recovered until the freed-up space is allocated to new files.
Reallocation of free space would result in overwriting of data that was retained after hard drive reformatting.
If you end up formatting the drive with a different partition, some overwriting may occur.
This is because the file indexes may be stored at different locations (other than the ones used by the old file system).
Commercial data recovery tools do a good job of recovering data from formatted or reformatted hard drives.
These software scan the medium sector by sector to search for traces of missing or inaccessible files that remain after reformatting.
You can recover the files with their original format absolutely intact.
This takes us to the old core belief that if something is invisible, it does not exist.
Let us quickly relate these two statements and shed some light on common misconceptions that surround reformatting of hard drives.
Reformatting is a kind of high-level format of a hard drive.
A high-level format differs from low-level format in that the former is performed on a functioning drive to erase its contents and create a new file system, while the latter prepares the drive for initial use.
Once the empty file system is created on the drive or volume after reformatting, you can store new data on this medium.
One thing that remains obscure is what happened to the contents of the drive after reformatting.
Reformatting and Data Loss The process of reformatting removes all contents of the medium.
However, this claim is true only to some extent.
This process is performed by the operating system, so it may differ from one operating system to other.
Typically, reformatting enables the drive to free up its contents and mark the space as 'available' for use by other data.
The data that existed on the drive before reformatting manages to be still there with its original format intact.
However, this data remains invisible to the operating system, and thus to the user.
This means that there is a good chance of recovering this data even after reformatting the drive.
Data Recovery after Reformatting The process of reformatting is much like deletion where your data is not fully erased.
Instead, the space occupied by this data is marked as available for reuse.
As the data is still present in its original place, it can be recovered until the freed-up space is allocated to new files.
Reallocation of free space would result in overwriting of data that was retained after hard drive reformatting.
If you end up formatting the drive with a different partition, some overwriting may occur.
This is because the file indexes may be stored at different locations (other than the ones used by the old file system).
Commercial data recovery tools do a good job of recovering data from formatted or reformatted hard drives.
These software scan the medium sector by sector to search for traces of missing or inaccessible files that remain after reformatting.
You can recover the files with their original format absolutely intact.
