Difference between fixing JPEG files and full-scale carving

There are many software tools to fix damaged JPEG files. One example is Stellar JPEG Repair, and you can easily google for more. These tools generally take a damaged JPEG file or several damaged JPEG files and fix them by some algorithm or other. They are normally applied to the output of some other data recovery process, most often to the output of the header-footer carver.

The difference between this approach and full-scale complex carving, which Klennet Carver does, is that complex carving has access to all the data on the media. In contrast, file repair tools are limited to the data already in the source files. Complex carving algorithms evaluate all the data on the media to make the best decision about which data sectors belong to which file. This makes the process much slower but dramatically improves the result because it accounts for files with more than one fragment and scrambled files with fragments out of order.

Filed under: File carving.

Created Friday, September 29, 2017

Updated 20 May 2018