ReclaiMe Data Recovery Research - The Average Size of an NTFS Volume Involved in Data Recovery is 2 TB

    VOLGOGRAD, RUSSIA, August 22, 2017 /24-7PressRelease/ -- ReclaiMe Data Recovery, one of the leading data recovery software vendors, today declared the results of the internal research aimed at determining the average volume of data and average number of files recovered from an NTFS volume.

The research found that the average amount of data recovered from an NTFS volume is 2 TB while the average number of files extracted is 600,000. The research was based on the ReclaiMe's statistics gathered from 2015-2017 and covered about 80,000 cases.

"It is not a secret that storage technologies are constantly evolving, mainly in the direction of increasing a storage capacity. Generally, there are two ways to do that - at the logical level where different physical disks are combined into a single large storage (for example, the MS Storage Spaces technology), and at the hardware level, where hard disk manufacturers are struggling to increase the capacity of a single disk - today you can buy a 12 TB rotational hard drive like Ultrastar He12." - said Elena Pakhomova, the co-founder of ReclaiMe Data Recovery Company. "Taking all this into account, we wanted to know the average size of an NTFS volume involved in data recovery. In our research, we have analyzed cases associated with recovering data from NTFS-formatted devices; NTFS was chosen because it is still the most popular filesystem."

NTFS (New Technology File System) is one of oldest, reliable, and well-researched filesystems. NTFS was designed by Microsoft in 1993 and first implemented in Windows NT 3.1. NTFS filesystem came to replace FAT and was originally conceived as a more reliable and flexible filesystem allowing to use disk space more efficiently.

NTFS metadata includes the Master File Table (MFT) which contains records about all folders and files stored on an NTFS volume. MFT records store names, sizes, attributes, and information about the location of clusters with a file content.
Unlike Linux filesystem where metadata is spread evenly across the volume, NTFS stores the MFT records closer to the beginning of the volume thus imposing certain limitations on data recovery.

Another NTFS specific is that even on a severely damaged NTFS volume you can get a plausible folder tree with the good names, sizes and the hierarchy while the file content can be totally lost. This is because names and sizes are taken from the MFT records, which are small and therefore survive the failure, while the file content is stored in different location the pointers to which are no longer correct. This often happens with complex storage devices like RAID; when, for example, even after an incorrect rebuild you can still get the "very good" folder tree with completely unusable file content.

We have analyzed data recovery cases associated with NTFS recovery from 2015 through the first half of 2017. We were after the both: the size of an NTFS volume typically involved in data recovery, and the number of files recovered from an NTFS volume.

According to our statistics, it turned out that NTFS volumes with the size up to 1 TB take slightly more than half of the recoveries. Most of disks (85%) are disks larger than 100 GB; that is they are hard drives, rather than flash drives.

As for the number of files recovered from an NTFS volume - partitions containing less than half a million files take 80% of the recovery cases. The share of partitions storing up to 200,000 files is about 50%. The average number of files extracted from NTFS volumes is about 600,000.

About ReclaiMe Data Recovery

ReclaiMe Data Recovery Company develops data recovery algorithms for various devices, from typical memory cards to complex NAS servers. Company piggy bank includes data recovery algorithms for RAIDs of different types, MS Storage Spaces, and a wide range of filesystems from Microsoft, Linux, and MacOS.

For more information about ReclaiMe Data Recovery, please visit www.ReclaiMe.com.

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