Many of today’s most popular television shows deal with the investigation of crimes and forensic sciences. In them investigators piece a series of subtle and tiny clues, or use new technology to uncover evidence that condemns the perpetrator beyond a shadow of a doubt. In the real life battle against crime, hard drive data recovery is often one of the most useful forms of forensic evidence collection helping to identify and convict real life criminals every day.

Data recovery is the term applied when data needs to be extracted from a computer hard drive or other type of digital storage media after that media has been willfully erased, corrupted by a computer virus, or even physically damaged. It’s been said of forensic data recovery, that once any piece of information has been on your computer, it’s there forever, and the user can never truly erase it, but can only make it harder to find. For the most part this is true. Erasing a file through ordinary means doesn’t even touch the data file. All it does is erase it from the drives index. That’s like removing a chapter from the table of contents at the beginning of a book, but leaving the chapter itself inside. You may not know exactly what page to turn to in order to find it, but if you look through all the pages, it’s there.

Because of the ubiquitous nature of computers and digital communication devices like the Blackberry and other email capable cell phones, many criminals leave digital footprints of their crimes. They may have plans and records on their computer, email records in which they discussed their crimes with others, or in some cases, stolen data or other direct evidence. Often the first thing they do when they think the police are closing in is erase the files, thinking that the problem is solved. Wrong.

Professional, high quality data recovery experts can pull every erased file from a computer hard drive and even recover evidence that the perpetrator tried to destroy they evidence by erasing it. They can trace email records, file transfers, and even follow supposedly anonymous accounts back to their origins. Any crime planned on a computer, discussed through email, or involving digital information of any kind leaves a trail of bread crumbs for investigators to follow.

Almost every time a story comes out about a suspect being arrested and his home searched for evidence, the search includes the seizure of the suspect’s computer. The computer records can determine a suspect’s guilt much better than any lie detector test, and they are, if seized with a properly executed search warrant, entirely admissible in a criminal trial.

Even sophisticated terrorist networks are often tripped up when their computer files are recovered from captured computers. Seized computers have played a large part in tracking down Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists and providing evidence of their crimes and future plans.

Data recovery is one of the most widely used and powerful tool of the forensic investigator.