People often lose valuable data by accident. Fortunately when data disappears from a computer it is not always gone for good.
The problem
A high profile politician had the content’s of their PC’s hard drive deleted and partially overwritten while the computer was having it’s operating system upgraded by an IT consultancy firm. Rather carelessly, no backup of the drive had been taken prior to the upgrade. The computer contained vital information including draft legislation, constituency contact lists, e-mails and much else. Our specialists were asked to recover as much as we could.
The solution
The technology and techniques used in computer forensics can also be used for data recovery. In this case we made a copy of the computer’s hard drive and, using search terms and concepts agreed with the client, we were able to identify remnants of files all over the hard drive. In some cases we were not able to recover original documents but could instead recover replicate data created by the word processing program while the document was being prepared. In other instances we brought back data that had temporarily been placed on the hard drive by the computer when reorganising its memory, and which had therefore never been formally “saved” on the computer at all. In most instances, however, we were able to bring back the lost data from the deleted spaces on the disk.
Our client was able to resume their work with minimal disruption.