• 👉 Overview
• 👀 What ?
• 🧐 Why ?
• ⛏️ How ?
• ⏳ When ?
• ⚙️ Technical Explanations
• 🖇️ References

👉 Overview

👀 What ?

Partitions, File Systems, and Carving are fundamental concepts in computer storage. A partition is a region of a hard disk that can be managed separately. File systems are ways of organizing data on a storage device like a hard disk or an SSD. Carving is a digital forensics technique that involves recovering files and fragments of files that are not linked to the file system's index.

🧐 Why ?

Understanding partitions, file systems, and carving is crucial because they form the basis of how data is stored, organized, and recovered in a computer system. In cybersecurity, these concepts are important for data recovery, digital forensics, and incident response. For instance, carving can be used to recover deleted files or fragments of files that could provide valuable evidence in a digital forensics investigation.

⛏️ How ?

To use or implement these concepts, you need to understand the basics of computer storage. For instance, you can create, delete, resize, and manage partitions using tools like fdisk on Linux or Disk Management on Windows. To work with file systems, you can use commands like mount, umount, and df on Linux, or Disk Management on Windows. For carving, there are digital forensics tools like Foremost and Scalpel that can recover files based on their headers, footers, and internal data structures.

⏳ When ?

These concepts have been in use since the early days of computing, with the partitioning and file systems being a fundamental part of operating system design, and carving becoming more prevalent with the rise of digital forensics in the late 20th century.

⚙️ Technical Explanations

At the heart of these concepts is the understanding of how data is stored on a computer. A hard disk is divided into partitions, which can each have a different file system. The file system is responsible for organizing files and directories, and keeping track of which sectors belong to which files and which are free. Carving comes into play when the file system's index is damaged or deleted - it allows for the recovery of files by searching for specific patterns that identify the start and end of a file. This can be a complex process, as it requires understanding of how different file types are structured.

🖇️ References