File Archaeology: A Novel Approach for File Recovery

Abstract

The term Digital data is not a new term to any computer user or computer scientists. All computer users are mainly doing one or more of below mentioned tasks with his computer. Those are storing, presenting, manipulating and sharing digital data. At the same time, computer scientists try find efficient and reliable techniques to accomplish above tasks. Therefore, we can state that computer world mainly based on digital data. Apart from above tasks, today we have to pay attention on protecting our data from several threats. Over the years researches have done much work to find efficient data protecting methods. Although there are many data protecting methods it is still possible to lost our valuable data. Therefore we have to develop reliable methods of getting our lost data back. With that intention we presented a novel approach for file recovery called File Archaeology. This new routine will protect users from their mistakes such as accidental file deletes while giving the chance of storage management to users. Our main target is to find a method that will give the chance to a user to recreate the file system into a previous state. By roll backing the file system into a previous state, user can see the file system as it previous was. Here all the deleted files are recovered and user can get the deleted files within the specified period. Also the current file system architecture will not alter by this new method. Only the existing features of the file system are used. Main purpose of this is to remain the popularity of the file system by not altering the file system architecture. This method will be more helpful to designing new file recovery tools and for new forensic tools.