eDiscovery Daily Blog
Simply Deleting a File Doesn’t Mean It’s Gone – eDiscovery Best Practices
I seem to have picked up a bit of a bug and I’m on cold medicine, so my writing brain is a bit fuzzy. As a result, so I’m revisiting a topic that has come up a few times over the years that we covered early on in the blog’s history. I should be back in the saddle with new posts next week!
Disk drives use an index or table to keep track of where each file begins and ends on the disk. You may have heard terms such as “FAT” (file allocation table) or NTFS ({Windows} NT File System) – these filing systems enable the file to be retrieved quickly on the drive. They’re like a “directory” of all of the active files on the disk. When a file is “deleted” (i.e., actually deleted, not just moved to the Recycle Bin), the data for that file isn’t actually removed from the disk (in most cases). Instead, the entry pertaining to it is removed from the filing system. As a result, the area on the disk where the actual data is located becomes unallocated space.
Unallocated space, also known as inactive data or drive free space, is the area of the drive not allocated to active data. On a Windows machine, deleted data is not actually destroyed, but the space on the drive that can be reused to store new information. Until the unallocated space is overwritten with new data, the old data remains. This data can be retrieved (in most cases) using forensic techniques. On MAC O/S 10.5 and higher, there is an application that overwrites sectors when a file is deleted. This process more securely destroys data, but even then it may be possible to recover data out of unallocated space.
Because the unallocated space on a hard drive or server is that portion of the storage space to which data may be saved, it is also where many applications “temporarily” store files when they are in use. For instance, temporary Internet files are created when a user visits a web page, and these pages may be “cached” or temporarily stored in the unallocated space. Rebooting a workstation or server can also clear some data from the unallocated space on its drive.
Since computers are dynamic and any computer operation may write data to the drive, it is nearly impossible to preserve data in the unallocated space on the hard drive and that data is not accessible without special software tools. To preserve data from the unallocated space of a hard drive, the data must be forensically collected, which basically copies the entire drive’s contents, including every sector (whether those sectors contain active data or not). Even then, data in the unallocated space may not be complete. Because the unallocated space is used to store new data, writing a new file may overwrite part of a deleted file, leaving only part of that file in the unallocated space.
Nonetheless, “deleted” files have been recovered, collected and produced in numerous lawsuits, despite efforts of some producing parties to destroy that evidence.
So, what do you think? Have you ever recovered deleted data that was relevant to litigation? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.