Next week I have a special project queued up – an entire week of data recovery. That is I bought a stack of hard drives that were supposedly cleaned and I see how clean they actually were. This is probably one of the nerdiest things I have done for a long while and I am really glad to be done with it, stick around and see why. I have Digital Forensics on my resume, because I was proud that I had taken (and passed) a course in college. In a job interview many years ago, the hiring manager asked why I had that on my resume. At the time I stumbled for an answer, but now I can unequivocally answer – that the next time you think a bit of electronic information is lost that at least 1 person has the knowledge and talent to recover it.
Then again, I am not using just one tool to recover things along the way, but I believe the spirit is the same between the tools … or at least the file recovery ones are concerned. The only difference is that the commercial tool recovers lost files, while the forensics tool ‘carves’ them out. Come back next week for a wild adventure with interesting discoveries to be had.