Case File Library · Volume Twenty-One

Cases 1001–1050

Volume Twenty-One opens a new library. Forty-Eight more real recoveries: recovery software left scanning for forty-eight hours on a drive that could not survive it, a batch of recordable discs from 2006 failing together as their dye decayed, a repair tool that failed partway and did its owner a favour, an encrypted stick locked out by nothing worse than a software update, a charity whose lost music could simply be converted again, an SSD reporting almost no wear that still would not start, a memory card and a SIM that failed in the same device on the same day, a prompt to initialise that one owner was right to refuse, and — at case 1050 — a day's location sound where the slate tone sounded, the timecode rolled, and nothing reached the card. 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.