Case File Library · Volume Twenty

Cases 951–1000

Volume Twenty closes the collection at a thousand case files. Forty-Nine more real recoveries: a student two weeks from submission whose drive slipped off the desk mid-edit, three platters out of a drive and the hardest answer in the archive, a stick that opened once and never again, a card encrypted to a device that no longer has the key, a modular power cable that was never interchangeable, an array re-created over the array it replaced, two storage units that replicated each other's failure faithfully, a drive with something loose rattling inside it, a card whose host offered to set it up in a supported format, and — at case one thousand — a man who spent eleven months being told, truthfully and uselessly, that his photographs could not be saved. 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.