Tools designed to harvest images from disks even after they have been deleted from the file system can be adapted to seek other file formats including Word documents, says Nasir Memon, a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.
In research that he hasn't yet published, Memon says will show that techniques used to cull images can be adapted to find text files, a capability that would be attractive to businesses trying to salvage data that may be fragmented and dispersed across a corrupted drive.