IntelligentScan is a unique data recovery technology that enables our software (R-Studio, R-Undelete, and others) to recover files even when the file structure of the disk is severely damaged, or the disk was formatted, even to another file system.

When our data recovery software scans the disk, it reads data directly from it, analyzes the obtained information, and then tries to determine a record type to which the data belongs. The following record types can be recognized:

• MBR/GPT records (all programs)
• NTFS Boot sector, folder, and MFT records (R-Studio and R-Undelete)
• FAT/exFAT Boot sector, folder, and file records (R-Studio and R-Undelete)
• ReFS Boot sector records and ReFS Meta blocks (R-Studio and R-Undelete)
• HFS/HFS+ Volume headers and HFS/HFS+ BTree+ nodes (R-Studio)
• APFS Super blocks, APFS Volume blocks, and APFS nodes (R-Studio)
• Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 FS SuperBlocks records (R-Studio and R-Linux)
• UFS/FFS SuperBlock records (R-Studio)
• Specific file signatures of Known File types for raw file carving (all programs)

All these record types have different, but known, data structure. Also known are the valid values of record fields and relations between them for each record type. Using this information, our data recovery software determines a record type for each piece of data. If the record type cannot be unambiguously determined, our program assigns the most probable record type to the data. Several record types may be assigned to the same piece of data with a certain probability for each assignment. These records are used to generate a list of possible files.

Our software then analyzes relations between elements in each list and between different lists, and generates a list of found partitions and their parameters, such as partition start point and probable size, file system type, cluster size, and probability of existence.

These file and partition lists are used to reconstruct file systems and files on the found partitions. One file can be attributed to several different partitions.

When the scan ends, our software shows those found partitions. R-Studio and R-Linux allow their user to manually correct the parameters of found partitions if additional information on their structure on the disk is available.

Our software uses the IntelligentScan technology to recover files not only from new and existing partitions but also from partitions that may have been deleted or reformatted. For example, when our software analyzes a disk with an NTFS partition reformatted to a FAT partition, it will show two partitions on the same place on the disk, one having the FAT file system, the other the NTFS one. It can then recover found files from either partition.