Metadata Recovery vs. Raw Recovery
How metadata-based recovery differs from raw content scanning, what each can reconstruct, and why file names and fragmentation depend on surviving structure.
Metadata tells recovery software what belongs together
File-system records can describe names, directories, timestamps, extents and allocation. When enough of that structure survives, recovery can often reconstruct files in context rather than merely recognize their contents.
Raw recovery recognizes content
Carving can use signatures, length fields, end markers and structural validation to identify file content in the sector stream. It is valuable when metadata is missing or unusable, but it may lose names, paths and timestamps.
Fragmentation is the difficult boundary
A fragmented file is not necessarily stored in one continuous run. File-system metadata may provide the extent map; a raw carver without that map must infer relationships from content, format structure or surrounding evidence, and sometimes cannot reconstruct the original file reliably.
The best result may combine both approaches
Recovery tools can use surviving metadata for most files and raw scanning for content that is no longer referenced. Raw results should not automatically replace better metadata-based results just because they produce a larger file count.
A raw scan can produce duplicates, old versions, false positives and unnamed fragments. Preserve metadata-derived context whenever it is trustworthy.
Related: Sparse and Thin-Provisioned Storage · Partition vs. File Recovery · Filesystem Recovery Vs Carving · File Carving Explained · Filesystem Corruption