The 2026 Handy Recovery Advisor Scholarship has officially come to a close. We received more than 300 applications from students interested in data storage and recovery. As promised, we’re now ready to announce the recipient of our $1,000 scholarship and share a little more about their work.
About the Scholarship and How We Selected the Winner
We started the Handy Recovery Advisor Scholarship because we believe more students should know about the opportunities in data storage and recovery. It’s a field that affects almost everyone who uses technology, and as storage devices become more advanced, there’s a growing need for people who understand how to keep data safe and recover it when something goes wrong.
As we’ve already mentioned, the scholarship attracted more than 300 applications, giving our team plenty to review. The selection process took place in two stages:
- The first round of reviews was handled by our QA team, which eliminated essays that relied entirely on AI or contained plagiarized material. Submissions that failed to address the assigned topics were also excluded.
- From there, our content team and a technical specialist took a closer look at the remaining submissions. In the second round, we wanted to see how thoroughly students covered their subjects and how well they could explain what they had learned. We also paid attention to the overall flow of each essay, with a preference for clear explanations and real-world examples over academic jargon.
Handy Recovery Advisor Scholarship Winner: Lucas Zhang
After discussing the strongest submissions and comparing our evaluations, we reached a final decision. Lucas Zhang was selected as the winner of the 2026 Handy Recovery Advisor Scholarship.
“I’m an 18-year-old high school student applying to college this year, and I plan to study Computer Science with the goal of pursuing a career in IT or cybersecurity. I’ve been interested in technology for as long as I can remember. My first interaction with it was at age eight, when my dad taught me how to connect an HDD to a PC using an extender adapter.
Outside of school, I run my own home lab, where I’ve been learning networking, Linux servers, system administration, and data storage while practicing personal security. I’ve also become increasingly interested in OPSEC and finding ways to better protect personal information and digital systems.
I applied for the Handy Recovery Advisor Scholarship because I genuinely care about data preservation. I rely on backups for my own projects and personal files, and I believe preserving digital information matters beyond individual users. Useful research, resources, and online content can disappear from the internet over time. Learning how to recover and preserve data is one way to help keep technology reliable and information accessible.”
Winning Essay by Lucas Zhang
We have received written permission from Lucas Zhang to publish his essay on Handy Recovery Advisor. The essay is presented below in its original form, without edits or modifications. What data recovery tools can and cannot do (common myths and limits) Imagine two people whose folder of family photos is accidentally deleted on the same afternoon. One of them has an older laptop with a spinning hard drive. Another has a modern laptop with an SSD. In the evening, both run the same recovery software. The former person stands reasonable chances to have the majority of photos appear on the list. The latter person has little hope of seeing anything. Mistake and the software are the same, but the difference lies in the approach taken by two types of drives to deleting data, and it explains the major capabilities and limitations of data recovery tools as well. The main principle of data recovery software is to read the physical contents of a device and understand where the particular data belongs to. Data recovery software cannot restore the data that is already erased, nor it can scan devices that don’t respond. Everything that is said about the ability of these programs to recover anything or inability to restore anything ever deleted falls under this simple scheme. The second chance provided by HDDs consists in the fact that the deletion of a file means the deletion of a pointer to that file and leaving the data itself. The file system marks these blocks as free, and the data stays there until it is overwritten. The recovery software scans the device to find leftover pointers. Once there are no pointers anymore, it searches for the data in accordance to the signature of a certain file format, e.g., JPEG in a process known as file carving. This method restores the content of the file, but loses its name and folders and if the file was stored in fragments, it may become corrupted since the tool has to assume where the fragment ends. Therefore, a scan which claims to restore thousands of files doesn’t mean much, because some files will turn out to be corrupt and unopenable. Data recovery isn’t binary and the number of files reported tells little about the quantity of files that can be used. However, in SSDs the picture changes drastically. The operating system sends a TRIM command to the device which tells it that the particular block is now empty of any important data. Since the flash memory has to be erased before being overwritten, the drive executes a background task of erasing these blocks in a process called garbage collection. According to the TRIM article on Wikipedia, once the TRIM command is issued and garbage collection finishes, data recovery becomes very difficult or even impossible depending on the firmware of the device. It is impossible to tell how long it takes in case of a particular device, since it is up to the controller of that device to decide. This information alone is enough to remember, on SSD the time to act is short and unpredictable. Encryption is the second limitation that surprises many people. Modern laptops and smartphones use the encryption of storage by default, through features like BitLocker in Windows and FileVault in macOS. Once the data is encrypted and the key or the password is lost, data recovery software scans the device to search for the scrambled data that it cannot decipher. This process is utilized on purpose by security professionals. According to NIST SP 800-88 Revision 1, which describes media sanitization guidelines, cryptographic erasure, destruction of the key, is a valid way of rendering the encrypted drive unreadable. Overwriting is a permanent operation. Once new data lands on those blocks, the old data is gone. According to NIST guide, a single overwrite with a fixed pattern, for instance, all zeros, is enough to hinder recovery of magnetic media data even by laboratory methods. This contradicts the common knowledge that several passes of overwriting are needed to erase the data and also implies that laboratories cannot be relied on for restoring data that has been overwritten. Therefore, the most valuable advice in the case of data restoration is the least exciting one, once the data is lost, cease using the device. With each download, browser cache writing, and system updates, more data is written to the device, and this data may overwrite what needs to be recovered. Data recovery software must be installed on another drive, and the recovered data must be stored to another drive as well to avoid overwriting. A physical failure of a drive is another story. The drive that starts clicking, disappears from the inventory of the computer, or freezes during the scanning cannot be restored by a software solution, which assumes that the device can be accessed, and further attempts to recover data from the failed drive increase the load. If the drive is accessible, the safest way would be to make a full image of it using the disk imaging software and run the recovery on the image. If the drive isn’t accessible, it should be taken to professionals. Thus, all of these limitations imply four points to check before running the scan which determine the results in most cases. The first point is the type of the device, it is either an HDD or an SSD. The second point is whether the device is encrypted and the key is still available. The third point is whether any data was written to the device after the loss. The fourth point is the health of the device. Anyone who answers these questions already knows the results of scanning and can distinguish an honest recovery service from the one that guarantees everything. Coming back to our two people with a deleted folder. The probabilities of their success are determined by the design choice of the people who designed those drives and made it years ago, and neither of them can change it now. However, what was still in their hands was the actions after that deletion. The only safe way in case of the second person, was making a backup before the mistake. We’d like to congratulate Lucas Zhang once again on winning the 2026 Handy Recovery Advisor Scholarship. We appreciate the time and effort he put into his essay, and we hope this award helps him take the next step toward his goals in computer science and cybersecurity. We also want to thank every student who applied. We had the chance to read many interesting perspectives on data storage and recovery. While we could only select one winner, we genuinely appreciate the work that went into each application. We hope that everyone who participated continues to develop their interests and pursue new opportunities in technology. And we hope this is just the beginning! We’d love to continue supporting students through similar initiatives in the future. Keep an eye on our website for updates and future opportunities. This article was written by David Morelo, a Staff Writer at Handy Recovery Advisor. It was recently updated by Roman Demian. Curious about our content creation process? Take a look at our Editor Guidelines.Thank You for Being Part of This Initiative