File basics
Before we get started on the practical aspects, let’s briefly go through some common terminology.
When we last covered filesystems in Chapter 6, Understanding File Systems and Storage, we learned that various operating systems use their own filesystems to be able to store, access, and modify data. Storage media use file systems to do the very same.
Metadata, or data about data, helps an operating system identify data. Metadata includes technical information, such as the creation and modification dates, and the file type of the data. This data makes it much easier to locate and index files.
As the name implies, unallocated space is an area of storage media that has been marked by an operating system or file table as empty, or unallocated to any file or data. Although the location of, and information about, the file is not present and sometimes corrupted, there are still characteristics about the file that reside in its header and footer that can identify...
