Mobile devices: data recovery specifics

Computing power of modern mobile phones and PDA often allows them to replace classic computers or laptops in such situations when you're on a holiday or business trip or just on the way. That's why these devices often serve to store some important personal or business information.

Being frequently exploited these devices are highly exposed to failures and data loss that may occur at any time. Fortunately, data recovery from mobile devices is possible. Moreover, computing power of PDA or mobile phones could be targeted at recovery of lost information from photo cameras and other compatible digital devices. The only thing you need is to download a proper data recovery software to your mobile phone or PDA and start recovery.

Mobile recovery specifics

Derived from embedded or desktop Windows CE OS, Windows Mobile provides device vendors with full-featured OS to run various applications on compact devices. Compatibility of Windows Mobile API with desktop Windows OS allows third-party vendors to create many applications for this OS. That's why Windows-Mobile-based compact devices now can contain much personal and business information: photos, documents, presentations, email databases etc.

Perspectives to recover lost information from this kind of devices depend much on architecture of a modern device. The most widely used configuration is small amount of 'main storage' and larger 'external storage' that uses embedded flash memory or removable flash memory cards.

Such 'external storage' is a physical flash chip or a flash card that permanently stores electronic information. This storage logically works exactly like a flash stick, connected to a computer and stores files to real file system (usually FAT or FAT32). Data recovery from this kind of storage is obvious and works exactly like on personal computers using specialized data recovery software.

In contrast to 'external storage', the 'main storage' is a virtual file system, emulated by special driver. This file system doesn't actually exist and is built on-the-fly by the driver from in-memory objects, stored in RAM and ROM. RAM is a volatile storage sensitive to power. That's why low-level power failure or 'could reboot' causes permanent data loss without any recovery perspectives. Moreover, even file deletion in the main memory causes RAM region to be released and this part of the file system cannot be emulated anymore.

Regarding data recovery on Windows Mobile devices, we can tell about good data recovery perspectives from flash storage. Our specialized software is adopted to run directly on Windows Mobile devices and provide device owner with data recovery functions even on trip, far from a desktop computer. Moreover, having photo camera or other digital device with compatible flash card, you may easily insert it to Windows Mobile-based phone or PDA and recover lost photos and other files.

However, primary concern remains data recovery from the 'main storage' that usually stores SMS, e-mail and other important files. We continue our work on the device analysis to provide our customers with a software solution that could help resolve this kind of data loss problem.