What is a primary use of file carving in digital forensics?

File carving is a technique used in digital forensics primarily to recover deleted files or fragments of files from storage media. When files are deleted, the data often remains on the disk until it is overwritten by new data. File carving bypasses the filesystem structure and scans the raw data on the disk to locate recognizable file signatures, allowing forensic investigators to extract these files, even if the filesystem has marked them as deleted.

In this context, recovering deleted images from disk drives aligns directly with the primary use of file carving, as the process involves searching for individual file headers and footers to reconstruct and recover the image files that have been removed from the filesystem but still physically exist on the media.

Other options like retrieving existing files from the cloud, compressing file sizes for storage, or optimizing file organization don't accurately reflect the purpose of file carving, which is focused on data recovery rather than management or retrieval of non-deleted files.