Abstract. Several fields of digital forensics (i.e. file carving, memory forensics, network forensics) require the reliable data type classification of digital fragments. Up to now, a multitude of research papers propos-ing new classification approaches have been published. Within this paper we comprehensively review existing classification approaches and classify

File carving is a recovery technique that recovers files based on information about their structure and content without matching file system information. As files can be recovered from their content and/or file structure this technique is indispensable during digital forensics investigations. So far many ap-proaches for the recovery of digital images have been proposed. The main contribution of this paper is a discussion of existing and new approaches for the recovery of multimedia files. After a short discussion of relevant multimedia file formats we present an overview of the current state-of-the-art in file carving. In the main part we focus on the implementation of a file carver for fragmented mul-timedia files. Finally, we summarize our findings and give an outlook with regard to post-processing files that have been recovered successfully.