Image by di_the_huntress via FlickrWhat is HFS file System? I’ve been searching from a quite some time what exactly is the HFS file system, here is what I found out, HFS (Hierarchical File System) is the most powerful and poplar file systems made for the hard drives and the floppy drives on Mac OS X. It is not used as the main file systems on earlier versions of Mac OS X, but still it is used on the hard drives and other Mac storage devices. HFS file system uses Apple OS X recovery solutions for Mac data recovery scenarios.
How data is managed by HFS file System?
As I came across to know what the file system is I went on to discover what if the file system goes corrupt can we recover data from the corrupt file system if yes then how to do that. The findings are as under:
Allocation blocks: HFS file system it divides the data in to several pieces of equal size. To do such a partition the file system allocates a 16 bit field for identifying particular block that is being allocated. This limits the allocation blocks to be less than 65,536. Allocation block is the smallest unit in the disk space that is being allotted to any of the files stored in the hard drive. The block allocation Map tracks the free for writing and the allocated blocks. The HFS file system replaces the flat file structure with the catalog file that uses B-Tree structure to define the files. It makes search of the files pretty quick, no matter how big the file size may be.
Causes of data corruption in HFS file system?
If you are stuck in a data loss situation then the Apple Os X can turn out to the savior for the lost data. Let’s see how data gets lost in HFS file system.
The data is now stored in the form of data structures by the HFS file system. This file system not only takes care of storing the data but it even takes care of managing, accessing, and manipulating the data, and the data corruption takes place as if any of these metadata structures get deleted or damaged. In such situations Apple Recovery solutions work fine. Data structure can get corrupt due to various reasons; it can be due to improper system shutdown, operating system malfunction and virus infection. These I will term as the major cause of the data corruption, there are times when the Apple Recovery solution didn’t work as expected so for those times the data recovery software for Mac can be the solution.
