SmartCarving™ Technology

Innovations in digital storage technology have dramatically improved the storage capacity of hard drives and memory cards. Research and development in data recovery, however, has been stagnant for decades. Every day hundreds of millions of people capture what they see, hear, touch, and feel to a variety of storage media. Thousands of them lose at least some of their digitally stored experiences daily. Every month over five million people search the web looking for ways to recover their lost data. Not everyone can recover everything they really need. Sadly, we have learned to live with what we cannot recover and blame ourselves for the losses.

Digital Assembly introduced not only a new method but also a new way of thinking about data recovery. Files on disks and memory cards are broken into small blocks prior to storage. SmartCarving™ looks at a deleted file as a giant jigsaw puzzle where each block of the file is a piece of the puzzle. Recovering a deleted file is like solving a jigsaw puzzle with tens of thousands of pieces. Recovering all the deleted files from a disk or memory card is like solving multiple jigsaw puzzles with hundreds of millions of pieces simultaneously! A task once considered "impossible" has now been made possible by an array of computer algorithms and sophisticated mathematical models. To our users all this simply means: more recovery with less effort.

Relevant Research Papers

The data recovery technology used in our products was developed at the Information Systems and Internet Security (ISIS) laboratory at the Department of Computer and Information Science, Polytechnic Institute of NYU. The SmartCarving™ was developed over years of research with the results presented and published in leading technical conferences and peer-reviewed journals. A selection of these research papers are available below.

  1. Challenges of SSD Forensic Analysis
    A talk by Nasir Memon
  2. Identification and recovery of JPEG files with missing fragments
    Digital Forensics Research Workshop (DFRWS), August 2009
  3. The Evolution of File Carving:The benefits and problems of forensics recovery
    IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Vol. 26. No 2., March 2009
  4. Detecting File Fragmentation Point Using Sequential Hypothesis Testing [slides]
    Digital Forensics Research Workshop (DFRWS), August 2008 (Best Paper Award)
  5. Automated Reassembly of File Fragmented Images Using Greedy Algorithms
    IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Vol. 15. No 3. March 2006
  6. Automated Reassembly of File Fragmented Images Using Greedy Algorithms
    Master's Thesis, Department of Computer and Information Science, Polytechnic University, 2005
  7. Automated Reassembly of Fragmented Images
    IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2003
  8. Automatic Reassembly of Document Fragments via Context Based Statistical Models
    Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, 2003
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