[3] Although written for law enforcement use, the program and its source code are freely available and can be used as a general data recovery tool.

[2] Foremost was created in March 2001 to duplicate the functionality of the DOS program CarvThis for use on the Linux platform.

[6] Foremost is designed to ignore the type of underlying filesystem and directly read and copy portions of the drive into the computer's memory.

[7] It is able to recover specific filetypes, including jpg, gif, png, bmp, avi, exe, mpg, wav, riff, wmv, mov, pdf, ole, doc, zip, rar, htm, and cpp.

[9] Foremost can be used to recover data from image files,[10] or directly from hard drives that use the ext3, NTFS, or FAT filesystems.