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Sys Dev Laboratories
SysDev Laboratories is one of the world leaders in the field of logical data recovery. Key areas of company's activities include logical data analysis, logical data recovery and custom software tools development.
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UFS Explorer Network RAID version 8 – presentation
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Restoring files with Raise Data Recovery – Step-by-step tutorial
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Recovery Explorer Professional version 8 – presentation
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UFS Explorer RAID Recovery version 8 – presentation
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What's new in version 8.11:
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UFS Explorer Professional Recovery: What's new in version 8.6
* Added tool for finding RAID6 Reed-Solomon code multiplicator coefficients;
* Added tool for unwrapping eCryptFS passwords from wrapped password files;
* Support of password unwrapping from Synology 'key file' backup and legacy keystore;
* Added address translation from component to RAID location for RAID0/1/1E/3/5/6/Span;
* Enabled support of address translation from disk-on-disk storage to parent;
* Raw data comparison tool:
- Added ability to change components order;
- Added tool for address translation to component;
* Indication of file chunk addresses on Btrfs file system and its scan result;
* Indication of inode offsets on Btrfs file system;
* Fixed rare crash bug that was happening at the end of storage scan;
* Fixed bug of failure of writing data to disk (modifying content) in SCSI mode;
* Modified handling of APFS metadata damage to show more structure when tree is damaged;
* Fixed several bugs with Btrfs file system scan;
* Raw recovery:
- 'Title' is now recovering as file name for .html and .wpl formats;
- Added title and date extracton from ODT/ODS/ODP document files;
- Fixed crash bug on invalid exe-file data.
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UFS Explorer Professional Recovery: What's new in version 8.5
* Added Adaptec RAID6 to 'Visual mode' of RAID Builder;
* Added 'Grid pattern' view mode to RAID Builder:
- Conversion of standard patterns to grid (including delay, shift etc.);
- Visualization of custom patterns created with RDL;
- Active pattern cell corresponds to hexadecima viewer position;
- Stripes naviagtion using pattern grid;
- Support of both vertical and horizontal pattern view modes;
* Added 'Entropy report' (histogram) to 'Reports view' of RAID Builder:
- Shows entropy histogram of all readable storage components;
- Configurable x-scale, y-scale and y-adjustment of the histogram;
- Supports sigma-smothing of histogram values;
- Custom histogram colors;
- Support of dynamic report reconfiguration when drives order is changed;
- Pick address location from report picture to navigation in hexadecimal viewer;
* In disk imager: handle BSY/DRQ status as a reason for retries and pausing imaging;
* Reworked procedure of deleted files recovery from EXT3/EXT4 file systems;
* Updated format of 'scan status database' and 'virtual file system' files;
* Photo viewer adopted for new digital camera raw formats of:
- CANON EOS-1D X Mark III, EOS 250D; Fuji GFX 100, X-Pro3, X100V, X-T4;
- Nikon D780, Z5; Pnanasonic DC-G100, DC-TZ95, DC-G90, DC-G95, DC-GX880;
- Sony DSC-RX100 VII, a7R IV, a6100, a9 II; Olympus TG-6 etc.
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UFS Explorer Professional Recovery: What's new in version 8.4
* Added DeepSpar Disk Imager network terminal to 'Tools' menu;
* RAID builder dialog:
- Added virtual sector size transform to disk menu;
- Changed icons to indicate component type and read method (System/ATA/SCSI);
- Ability to load partial RAID config via this UI (when components are missing);
- Displaying drive serial number or image file path as ID for missing components;
* RAID configuration files:
- Save/restore drive read method (System/ATA/SCSI);
- Drive Serial Number is now saved to config file;
- Restore RAID config with verification and priority of drive Serial Number;
- When disk image is not found, searching it at the same location on other drives;
- URCF extension is now mandatory for RAID configuration files;
* Added error reporting for bad RAID configs when opened via general 'Open' dialog;
* Added 'Skip file' button to copying dialog (to skip individual files);
* Raw recovery:
- Added file name generation for .contact, .vcf, .fb2 files;
- Recovery of name (Original/Internal) and build date from Windows executables;
- Adjustment of file size for EXE/DLL/SYS files to match size of sections and signature;
* Speed-up of properties (preview) extraction for Windows executable files;
* In disk list: change drive icon to ATA/SCSI when drive works with custom method;
* Added ability to change read method via storage properties;
* In 'Open device': devices are re-sorted by drive number.
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ReFS file system inside
Microsoft company have released Windows Server 2012 with support of the advertised ReFS (Resilient File System), early known under the code name "Protogon". This file system was offered as an alternative to NTFS file system, proven over the years of its existence in the segment of Microsoft-based data storage systems with its further migration into the area of client systems.
This article gives an overview of ReFS file system structures, its advantages and disadvantages as well as analysis of its architecture from the point of view of data consistency maintenance and data recovery chances in case of corruptions or deletions by the user. The article also discloses the researches of architecture properties of the file system and its performance capabilities.
Windows Server 2012
The file system variant available in this operating system version supports data clusters of 64KB in size and metadata clusters of 16KB. Presently it remains unclear if ReFS would support other cluster sizes. Now “Cluster size” option is ignored and is set by default at creation of ReFS volume. At file system formatting 64KB is the only option for cluster size. Besides, this size is the only mentioned in blogs of the developers.
This cluster size is more than sufficient for organization of file systems of any size from the set of actually implemented, but at the same time causes notable redundancy of data storing.
File system architecture
Despite the fact that ReFS is often mentioned as the file system similar to NTFS at the top level, this similarity only concerns compatibility of some metadata structures such as “standard information”, “file name”, compatibility by values of some attributes flags etc. Disk implementation of ReFS structures is completely different from other Microsoft file systems.
Major structural elements of the new file system are B+-trees. All elements of the file system structure are represented as one-level lists or multi-level B+-trees what allows to significantly scale almost all file system elements. Such file system structure together with actual 64-bit count of all system elements excludes emergence of “bottlenecks” during further scaling.
Except the B+-tree root record the rest of the records have the size of the integral metadata block (in this case 16KB); and intermediate (address) nodes have a small full size (about 60 bytes). For this reason a small quantity of tree levels is usually required for description of even huge structures what has quite positive effect on general performance capabilities of the system.
Major structural element of the file system is “Directory” represented as B+-tree in which the key is the number of object folder. Unlike other similar file systems, a file in ReFS is not a separate key element of the “Directory”, and rather exists as a record in the parent folder. Probably, hard links on ReFS are not supported due to this architecture property.
“Directory leaves” are typed records. There exist three major record types for object folder: directory descriptor, index record and sub-object descriptor. All such records are zipped as a separate B+-tree with folder identifier; the root of this tree is the leaf of the “Directory” B+-tree what allows to zip almost any number of records into the folder. The lowest level of folder B+-trees contains, first of all, directory descriptor record that includes basic data about the folder (such as name, “standard information”, file name attribute etc.). Data structures have much in common with that of NTFS, though, at the same time they have a range of structural differences, the major of which is absence of a typed list of named attributes.
Further on in the directory follow so-called index records: short structures containing data about folder elements. These records are much shorter compared to NTFS what overloads the volume with metadata to a lesser extent. Directory elements records follow the last. For folders these elements contain folder name, folder identifier in the “Directory” and the structure of “Standard information”. For files this identifier is absent, but instead the structure contains all basic data about the file including the root of file fragments B+-tree. Accordingly, the file may consist of nearly any number of fragments.
The files are allocated on disk in blocks of 64 KB, though they are addressable in the same way as metadata blocks (in clusters of 16KB in size). File data residence is not supported by ReFS, for this reason a file of 1byte in size will take the whole 64KB block on the disk what results in substantial storage redundancy what concerns small files; on the other hand, this makes free space management easier and allocation of a new file takes much less time.
Metadata size of an empty file system is about 0.1% of the file system itself (i.e. about 2GB for 2TB volume). Some basic metadata are duplicated to increase resilience to failures.
Judging on the architecture, boot from ReFS partitions is possible, but is not implemented in this Windows Server edition.
Resilience to failures
The research wasn't focused on stability of the existing ReFS implementation. But judging on architecture, the file system has all necessary tools for safe files recovery even after severe hardware failures. Parts of metadata structures contain their own identifiers what allows to check structures origin; links to metadata contain 64-bit check sums of the referenced blocks what very often allows to estimate the consistency of the contents read by the block link.
At the same time it's worth mentioning that the check sums of user data (files contents) are not counted. On the one hand this turns off the mechanism for consistency test in the data area, on the other hand this speeds up system operation due to minimal modifications in the metadata area.
Any modifications of metadata structure are made in two stages: at first, a new (modified) metadata copy is made in a free disk space, then, on success, atomic update operation shifts the link from the old (not-modified) to a new (modified) metadata area. This strategy (Copy-on-Write (CoW) allows to avoid journalizing automatically maintaining consistency of the data. Confirmation of such modifications on disk may not be made for a long time allowing to combine several modifications of file system statuses into one.
This scheme is not applied to user data, for this reason any modifications of file content are made directly to file. File deletion is conducted with reorganization of metadata structure (using CoW) what saves the previous version of metadata block on the disk. This makes recovery of deleted files possible until they are overwritten with new user data.
Storage overuse
In this article we speak about the use of storage space with data storing scheme. With testing purposes Windows Server was copied to ReFS partition 580GB in size. The size of metadata on an empty file system was 0.73GB.
At copying of the installed Windows Server to ReFS partition overuse of files data increased from 0.1% on NTFS to nearly 30% on ReFS. Besides, about 10% of overuse was added by metadata. As a result, user data 11 GB in size (more than 70 thousand files) together with metadata took 11.3GB on NTFS, when the same data on ReFS took 16.2GB showing that overuse on ReFS is nearly 50% for this data type. What concerns small quantity of files of a large size this effect is certainly absent.
Operational speed
As we speak about Beta-version file system performance capabilities were not benchmarked. But file system architecture allows to make some conclusions. Copying of more than 70 thousand files on ReFS created 4-level “Directory” B+-tree: “root”, intermediate level 1, intermediate level 2, “leaves”.
As a result, folder attributes search (on condition of tree root cashing) requires 3 readings of blocks 16KB each. For comparison, this operation on NTFS requires 1 reading of blocks 1-4KB in size (on condition of $MFT location card cashing).
Files attributes search by folder and file name in the folder (not large folder with several records) on ReFS requires the same 3 readings. And on NTFS it will require 2 readings 1KB each or 3-4 readings (if file record is in a non-resident attribute “index”). In large folders the number of NTFS readings increases much faster than the number of readings required for ReFS.
This applies to file contents as well: where the growth of the number of file fragments on NTFS results in sorting large lists located in different $MFT fragments, on ReFS this is done by efficient search in B+-tree.
Summary
It's early to make final conclusions, but judging on the current file system implementation we can see that the file system is indeed designed for server segment and, first of all, virtualization systems, DBMS and backup servers where operational speed and reliability are of principal importance. Major disadvantages of the file system, such as inefficient data zipping on disk, come to nothing on systems that operate large files.
SysDev Laboratories included this file system into the list of supported file systems for data recovery. R-explorer professional edition already supports the data recovery from ReFS and also ReFS 2. We will post a review of the second version soon.
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Data recovery from HP EVA
The task with HP Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) was successfully solved. Now we can recover data from EVA 4100/6100/8100 and EVA 4400/6400/8400 server families. Meanwhile, the development of data recovery solution, compatible with 6300 and 6500 server families is in progress.
Now you have an opportunity to recover data from the servers listed above and to deal with some other common problems:
recover information after logical failures of a storage
recover deleted storage pools
perform data recovery after a RAID failure
Learn more about our products ►
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Recovery Explorer: professional data recovery software solution
Recovery Explorer programs serve to resolve data recovery issues of any focus and complexity. Each of the Recovery Explorer applications contains its set of tools in order to find the most appropriate approach to the user task. The software cover data loss cases both in a home and business environments. These applications include solutions as for average users without technical skills as for highly skilled data recovery technicians.
Recovery Explorer Standard is a software application that perfectly fits a self-made recovery from a vast variety of logical data loss cases.The application allows retrieving lost and deleted files from local computers,externally attached media and up to virtual disks or disk images formatted through a file system of either Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. The software interface mode can be conventional or Wizard.
Read more: http://r-explorer.com/recovery_explorer_standard.php
Recovery Explorer RAID Recovery is a software application targeted at logical reconstruction of RAID storage systems including the ones from local computer and network attached storages (NAS). The application covers standard and nested, redundant and non-redundant RAID configurations. In addition, this software will let you reconstruct RAID even with a missing drive. The software interface mode can be conventional or Wizard.
Read more: http://r-explorer.com/recovery_explorer_raid.php
Recovery Explorer Professional is a top-level software application designed with the aim to fit even severe and complicated logical data loss cases. This application includes a comprehensive set of tools to handle encrypted storages, to reconstruct a logical RAID structure, including custom and virtual configurations, to conduct an in-depth raw data analysis and editing and in general to provide the technical expert with everything needed for maximally efficient data recovery.
Read more: http://r-explorer.com/recovery_explorer_professional.php
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Data recovery from portable storage media
With ability to store quite large amount of digital information, high performance speed, great efficiency, excellent space-saving features and installation simplicity portable storage media such as USB flash drives, external hard drives, mp3 players and memory cards have gained considerable popularity. Unfortunately, despite constantly improving reliability these devices are still exposed to data loss causes. Improper plug-in or removal of the device, power cuts as well as accidental file deletion may cause disappearance of valuable information stored on the medium. Contrary to popular belief, lost data don't disappear for good.
For that reason it's strongly recommended to stop using the device as soon as data loss problem is detected. Further on a proper data recovery software will resolve the problem.
Portability of external storages allows for their formatting under any operating system with any file system. Choosing a recovery software you should consider its capability to work with the file system the medium is formatted with. For recovery of lost files from portable storage media SysDev Laboratories advise to use UFS Explorer software as a comprehensive and universal solution applicable to any file system or Raise Date Recovery applicable to a single specific file system type. These software have embedded innovative techniques powerful enough to recover files from various portable storage media with successful recovery result.
Get more information about the software : http://sysdevlabs.com/store.php
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UFS Explorer Professional Recovery
UFS Explorer Professional Recovery is a full-featured software application designed exclusively for data recovery specialists. The application successfully combines low-level data analysis and data management functions with high-level data recovery tools. UFS Explorer Professional Recovery is the only software of the UFS Explorer group that allows to alter original information on the storage.
Advanced multi-tool interface makes the software suit even complicated data recovery tasks. With UFS Explorer Professional Recovery you can carry out thorough data analysis and conduct full-scaled data recovery. Embedded RAID-Builder mechanism allows to build standard RAID configurations of any level. Moreover, 'RAID definition language' used by this software will let you build any custom RAID configuration. If necessary, low-level tools of UFS Explorer Professional Recovery allow to make permanent changes to the information initially contained on the storage. The software can be installed to several operating systems - Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS and Linux.
With consideration for user-friendliness software tools are grouped into several separate blocks each applicable to certain operations. Disk management system automatically defines storages and opens disk images, standard and custom RAID configurations as well as virtual disks of virtual machines. The system will let you open a disk partition or a storage device specifying name or mount point (disk letter, mount path etc.). UFS Explorer Professional Recovery embraces embedded Hex-Viewer tool that allows to view data on a disk or separate disk partition and alter including overwrite data on the storage. File manager allows to preview existing file system and recover data from it. Among other functions file manager includes files search and preview, data analysis, identification and positioning by file content and file descriptors. File system recovery manager allows to find files, preview found files and recover them to a local disk. For added convenience UFS Explorer Professional Recovery manages simultaneous performance of multitasking operations.
Designed for professionals this product requires at least basic user expertise. The software contains a set of safe read-only data analysis tools that allow to solve most practical data loss cases and a write-enabled hexadecimal editor to correct even severe cases of file system damages.
As a comprehensive multi-functional application UFS Explorer Professional Recovery will be perfect solution for detailed data analysis and professional recovery of lost and deleted data.
Get more information about data recovery software: http://www.ufsexplorer.com/download_pro.php
Buy UFS Explorer Professional Recovery: http://www.sysdevlabs.com/product.php?id=ufsxp5&os=win
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Accidentally deleted files. Is that an emergency?
After ordinary operation on deletion of unnecessary files realizing that deleted files are still necessary doesn't worth panic. Deleted files might be retrievable. The means are different. The most simple situation is when the files can be simply copied from the recycle bin or got back by means of the operating system. The situation is more complicated when the files have been deleted by emptying or bypassing the recycle bin (pressing Shift-Delete, using command line or applications that delete files without recycle bin). In these cases files are no longer accessible from the operating system, in case when they are not overwritten they might be recovered by means of a specialized data recovery software.
SysDev Laboratories offer UFS Explorer as a utility to resolve file deletion problem. The software works with any file type - documents, presentations, graphic files, photos, music, videos, database files etc. With powerful and rapid scan engine the tool will recover files from any operating system and from a great variety of storage devices from portable media to complex RAID-systems.
Note: For successful recovery never write anything to the disk that contains the files you want to recover. Otherwise, the files will be overwritten that causes permanent data loss.
Get more information about the software : http://sysdevlabs.com/store.php
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Clustered file systems
Clustered file systems are used in computer cluster systems. These file systems have embedded support of distributed storage.Among such distributed file systems are:
ZFS - Sun company 'Zettabyte File System' - the new file system developed for distrubuted storages of Sun Solaris OS.
Apple Xsan - the Apple company evolution of CentraVision and later StorNext file systems.
VMFS - 'Virtual Machine File System' developed by VMware company for its VMware ESX Server.
GFS - Rad Hat Linux 'Global File System'.
JFS1 - original (legacy) design of IBM JFS file system used in older AIX storage systems.
Common property of these file systems is distributed storages support, extensibility and modularity.
Read about data recovery for these file systems: http://www.ufsexplorer.com/und_del.php#clustered
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