The act of formatting is similar to deletion of data. In both these operations (Deletion and Formatting), the data from their location get removed and we fail to access them with any normal means. In case of deletion, the operating system simply removes the data from its source location, whereas in case of formatting, the data as well as the structure of the volume are removed by the OS. In both the cases, the operating system removes all entries of the deleted data and marks the memory location as free so that new data can be stored at the same location.
In this context, the interesting thing is that the operating system never completely erases the deleted or formatted data from the hard drive and even after such an operation, your seemingly lost data are very much present at their locations. If the lost or removed entries of the deleted/formatted data can be retrieved, then the data can be easily restored.
LINUX recovery software are developed with innovative techniques to find out the lost entries of files due to deletion or formatting of them. These utilities are efficient enough to read those lost entries and recover the files back. Moreover they are designed with completely read only approach and retrieve data in their original format, without any damage/modification neither to the data nor to the storage architecture of the drive.
