CnW Recovery 2004 - 2025....
Having left eMag Solutions I wanted a project. Ideally one I knew something about, but not one that cause a conflict of interest with eMag Solutions.
The very first plan was for CD recovery. The thought behind this was due to an instance while on a weekend photographic course. One of the students tried to add her photos to a CD and ended up erasing the existing photos. With my laptop, a bit of lateral thinking, and use of InterMedia for Windows I managed to recover her photos. I started work on a new program, CnW Recovery that just processed CDs. As before, I used Visual Studio (2003) and MFC working on a new InterMedia/eMag sourced Windows XP Pentium based PC. I actually still have it basically unchanged except for updated hard drives and extra memory. Still running Windows XP.
After a few weeks I had a request to recover a FAT32 hard drive - and so I started to develop software to process FAT32. Next drive was NTFS, so this was added. At this point, the main method of working was to read the physical sectors in such a way that if a sector(s) was unreadable, the recovery process would continue.
Development continued to include disk imaging, and data carving. The disk imaging was at the time unusal in that I could build up an image in sections rather than starting at sector 0 and going on to the end. This way meant that areas of a failing disk could be skipped and effort concentrated on getting as much good data as possible. The difficult areas where then tackled later with many more retries, and only if the actual sector was required. Overall a prcess to try and extract as much data as possible with the least possible damage to the drive. If the drive would not read, I would have to pass on the job.
After about 1 year of time, the software was good enough to be sold, and so I started online sales via internet and using PayPal for world wide sales. I priced the software in US $ as more European customers would probably accept US $ than Americans accepting anything foreign.
In the early 2000s, the market was big and drives not totally reliable. With fairly low pricing, sales went well with licences ultimately ranging from $19.99 for a 30 day licence to $159.99 for a full forensic version.
Then product expanded and embraced most common logical formats of the day from NFTS, and MacOS systems, as well some Unix file systems such as Reiser 3. The big change started in early 2010s with many more video devices. The critical point about many of these files is they were not recorded sequentially on the disk drive. The extreme case of this is found in. action cameras such as GoPro and DJI. These cameras record high and low resolution files at the same time, physically interleaved. When a video is deleted, all the FAT allocation is lost leaving sometimes 2,000 fragments to be reconstructed.
My first attempts at solving this problem were within CnW Recovery. However, I realised that a general purpose PC recovery program was not necessarily the best platform. Therefore I started on a simplified version just for video memory chips. It started with just GoPro, hence the name GoPro recovery, but expanded to many .MP4 formats. My most upsetting issue was relating to competitors. Many companies claimed to recover from GoPro but very simply did not recover from non sequential files as found on the memory chips. I had many customers who had paid good money for another product that did not work.
GPR, this just handled initially GoPro memory chips. Over the years this was expanded to handle video cameras, DJI being one of the earlier ones. Eventually suipport for many .MP4 video formats was included. Other popular ones included Canon and Sony formats. Although these did nit have multiplexed data streams, many physically stored the video data before the header data. The camera then 'played' with the FAT to make the fie looks sequential. Some formats stored all header data at the start of the memory chip, and the video data maybe starting 10% through the memory chip. To recover these files it is necessary to tie the two secions up. A lot of time, research and testing went into developing routines that worked with a high degree of success.
Sale to Disk Drill
In September 2023 I received an unexpected e-mail from someone wanting to buy CnW / GPR. Very suspiously I replied asking who they were. The response was Disk Drill (Clever Files). We started talking and I decided it may be a good way forward. A price was agreed and early 2024 CnW, including GPR became the property of Disk Drill. I was retained to assist in the transfer of software and knowledge to their main data recovery product. This was an interesting process as their data recovery approach is very different to mine, but the end results can be very good.
Shaking hands on the deal, January 2024
CnW was built to be very powerful, and allowed users to tweak many parameters. This could mean certain recoveries were possible, but it was harder to use than Disk Drill. However, Disk Drill could not handle GoPro type files. The revised Disk Drill has been launched, and my testing of internal Beta versions has been extremely impressive, giving perfect GoPro recoveries. Making use of other peoples software (even mine) is never easy, but they have done a good job.