The Peculiarities of Deleted Files Recovery in FAT32 File System

The FAT 32 file system, despite its solid age, still, remains relevant and demanded by a large number of flash drives and other devices. First of all, it is caused by its simplicity and high-speed performance. At the same time, there is a number of problems revealed in the course of practical use of this file system, for example, it does not support files of 4 gigabytes in size and more. Besides, this file system has low fault tolerance and also there are essential difficulties at recovery of mistakenly or accidentally deleted files. First, it is caused by erasing of a chain of clusters in the file table during file deletion. That does not allow to discover which clusters and in what sequence the content of the deleted file was stored. Secondly, during file deletion in its file record two top bytes of the first cluster address are erased. That significantly complicates search of the first file cluster and the subsequent identification of its chain of clusters. For these problems' solution authors developed the algorithm of recovery of deleted files described earlier and received evaluation of efficient recovery of deleted files of different types by means of this algorithm.