Data Recovery & Computer Forensics Blog

Last night in front of hundreds of businessmen and women of Austin, Flashback Data took the first award of the night in the Small Business Innovation category at the 2009 Greater Austin Business Awards.  We are very excited to be recognized for our hard work in innovating our industry’s technology and processes.  This is a big step forward for Flashback Data to continue our mission of providing outstanding service and fantastic customer support.  We would like to thank the whole team at Flashback Data and everyone who has supported us throughout the years.

Austin Chamber Press release:

http://www.austinchamber.com/TheChamber/AboutTheChamber/NewsReleases/2009/2009_08_27.html

And Photos of the Winners:

http://www.austinchamber.com/TheChamber/AboutTheChamber/09bisaw/index.html

We recently received a hard drive turned over by a former employee of our client.  The drive would not work and had been sent in for data recovery.  Indeed, when we brought it into the lab, the drive was not powering on.  It was time to do a little investigation.

Examining the drive connectors, we noted some deep scoring on the connectors that was not consistent with any accidental scratches we might expect to see if a drive had been improperly disconnected.  A photograph of the scratches can be seen at right.  The scratches have been marked in the right-hand frame.

Having determined that there had  been some deliberate and intentional damage done to the drive, we continued to investigate – this time, with a keener eye for other intentional damage that may have been inflicted on the drive. Continue Reading »

Recently, we received a hard drive for investigation as part of litigation.  This drive had come from the work computer of an employee terminated by our client six months prior, now the subject of the litigation.

When we received the drive, it was apparent that it had been tampered with.  Hard drives typically come with stickers over one or more of the case screws.  These stickers are there to allow the manufacturer to void the warranty when the drive is opened by an unauthorized person.  In this case, the sticker was punctured and the screw was exposed.  Continue Reading »

Hint: R does not stand for Re-build or Re-initialize, or even Re-Format or Re-arrange. 

 All joking aside, most people in the IT field understand what a RAID array is and how it can help protect your data if used correctly, but many people do not understand what to do in the event of a system or drive failure.

 First of all, let’s start at the beginning for the non-techie folk out there who just bought a Dell XPS system with a 2TB RAID 0 array simply because they heard it was fast and redundant.  Most of these people might not have any idea they have an array, they just got it because it was a lot of storage.  Anyways, RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks.  It is a hardware or software based system that uses 2 or more hard disk drives that work together to achieve one of three things: Continue Reading »

If you followed this year’s Consumer Electronic Show you might have learned that solid state drives (SSD’s) are the latest hot topic taking the data storage industry by storm.  No, hard drives aren’t going away any time soon, but the increase in production and decrease in cost in SSD’s is definitely bringing them to the forefront.  SSD’s are now creeping into the hand of consumers as notebook manufacturers are now including SSD drives as options in their top of the line notebooks. 

SSD drives are great for several reasons: Continue Reading »