Defective Documents and Corrupt Data Recovery

There are several different reasons why a file or a document is defective and no langer accessible. Our technicians are working on data carriers affected by hardware damage or bugs in applications or the operating system on a daily basis.

Hardware damage

If a data carrier experienced surface damage (e.g. after a headcrash), the data on the affected sectors is no longer readable. In this case, your data cannot be reconstructed without an existing backup.

Software errors

The system shows a file with file name, date and time stamp, but with a size of 0 bytes. We advise you to stop working on the system immediately. The longer is keeps runnig, the higher the chances of important data being overwritten. The "0 byte problem" is induced by bugs, which are errors in the operating system or applications like Word and Excel or on SQL servers. If an error occurs during a writing process the file system information abput the sector numbers is lost.

The 0 byte problem

As mentioned above, the most important thing is to stop working on the data carrier immediately. If you stick to that, the chances of a successful data rescue are high, independent of the operating system and file type. Our technicians are confronted with the 0 byte problem regularly, for example with Microsoft SQL databases, .mdf files, Word or Excel documents or e-mail archives.

0 byte problem under Linux

Attingo developed special methods to solve the 0 byte problem in the Linux file systems ext, ext2, ext3 and ext4. This works with a few megabytes as well as with more gigabytes and fragmented data.