Home

Microsoft has released a new version of FAT32 called exFAT, extended FAT.  It is designed mainly for portable drives using computered with limited computing power, such as cameras and hand held devices.  The main advantage is that it no longer has a 4GB file size limit and has better operation with disk drivers larger than 32GB.  The format has many similarities to FAT, but the major difference is in file allocation.  There is a bitmap used for cluster allocation.  There is a FAT to handle fragmented files, but if a file is not fragmented, the FAT is not used.  The benefit is that when writing to a disk, a FAT does not have to be updated with every cluster written, and the performance increase can be dramatic.  It is now very rare to find a fragmented exFAT file, which menas that recovery should be easier, even when much of the disk has been damaged.

32 GB is a limit that Microsoft has tried to implement on FAT32 disks for performance purposes, even though drive happily work with 1TB of data.  ie, the limit is just the maximum size that Microsoft will format the drive to, though there are many free untilies to overcome this restriction

The CnW Recover routine will recover deleted files and also scan unallocated area for any lost files