Defining custom file formats for Deep Scan

[smmx]

First of all, this is an awesome piece of software, and pretty much saved me after Windows decided to try to install itself on the wrong drive, and pretty much destroyed its MFT. Unfortunately, while Deep Scan was able to get most if not all common file formats back (JPG, GIF, PNG, etc), it didn't detect any of the more esoteric ones (PSD, RIF, MFA, ones most people don't have... and there's a lot more). I checked the previous versions logs and it looks like Deep Scan has to be configured to look for each filetype.

 

I'm not sure exactly how Deep Scan looks for these files... I'm assuming, at the very least, it checks for specific byte sequences that mark the beginning of a file, maybe a separate sequence at the end, and checking for metadata if it's present. If it does something similar to this, it would be a great option to have a text file where you could define those sequences; for example, if said text file was an ini, an entry might look like this:

 

 

;example... PNG is already supported but this works well enough for an example[PNG Image]extension = pngstart = 0x89, 0x50, 0x4e, 0x47 ;basically just the ASCII code of each byteend = 0x49, 0x45, 0x4e, 0x44, 0xae, 0x42, 0x60, 0x82 ;if used

 

or one of those "obscure" ones

 

 

[MMF2 Source]extension = mfastart = 0x4d, 0x4d, 0x46, 0x32 ;plus additional ones that may be required, again I'm not sure what it looks for

 

 

Coincidentally, these "obscure" formats are actually files I want to recover the most. If it'd be possible to add this feature to Deep Scan, Recuva would be even better.

 

I really haven't looked around, but I'm not sure of any other recovery programs that allow you to do this, much less for free. Thanks for the great program!