Mobile recvovery specifics: recover lost information on/with Windows Mobile phone or PDA.

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Mobile devices: data recovery specifics

The one more popular computer device is a mobile phone or PDA. The modern computing power of these devices often allows them to replace classic computers or laptops. That's why these devices often store huge amount of personal or business information.

Data loss on this kind of devices still may occur and data recovery is the solution. Moreover, computing power of PDA or mobile phones could be re-used for mobile data recovery of lost information on photo cameras and other compatible digital devices.

Notice:

This article applies for Windows Mobile based devices and does not cover Apple products, as well as products with Symbian OS, Linux OS etc.

The article will be updated in future to reflect additional researches in mobile data 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. The Windows Mobile API compatibility 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 and so on.

Lost information recovery perspectives for this kind of devices much depend on modern device architecture. 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 physical flash chip or 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 does not actually exists and is built on-the-fly by the driver from in-memory objects, stored in RAM and ROM. RAM - is the volatile storage that is sensitive to power and so on. That's why low-level power failure or 'could reboot' causes permanent data loss without any recovery perspectives. Moreover, even file deletion in 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 the road or 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 etc.

However, often the main concern is data recovery from 'main storage' that usually stores SMS, email and so on. We continue our work on the device analysis to provide our customers with a software solution that could help to resolve this kind of data loss.