Case File Library · Volume Nineteen

Cases 901–950

Volume Nineteen is about reading what a device is telling you. Forty-Eight more real recoveries: a drive whose light never stops flashing because it is retrying rather than working, one recognised only while held up, a document that was open for a month and never saved, a card that hangs the very tools meant to inspect it, a photograph that reappeared once and proved everything was still there, an encrypted drive whose key lives inside the dead laptop it came from, a modular power cable that was never interchangeable, a Fusion Drive that is two devices behind one name, a Mac told it was beyond help by the people who built it, a storage pool being honest about corruption it had detected, and an estate that asked for the drive to be imaged before anyone asked whether it could be read. Every case is a genuine enquiry, its identifying details changed or removed, its lesson kept whole. Every recovery names its instruments: the ACE Lab PC-3000 Express with Data Extractor and PC-3000 Flash with Spider Board, MRT Ultra, Atola TaskForce 2 and Atola Insight Forensic, DeepSpar USB Stabilizer 10Gb and RapidSpar, the Rusolut Visual NAND Reconstructor, Flash Extractor, Passware Kit Forensic, and OSForensics.