The number of crimes involving electronic data is sky-rocketing these days, particularly with the immense preponderance of computers and other digital media in our lives. Thus, data forensics has become a distinct sub-division of forensic science consisting of technical expertise, the finding of electronic evidence, digital investigations and even data recovery. To count only a few of the judicial cases for which data forensics is useful, we ought to mention breach of contract, intellectual property theft, discrimination, sexual harassment and so on. Therefore, it is not that difficult to understand why data forensics is so important in the legal system.

The exact specificity of computer forensics data recovery is the extraction of pieces of information that would remain undetected at a normal investigation. Data forensics will normally examine files that are hidden, deleted or even discarded, as well as fragments or file left-overs. Although it often seems impossible to recover data or to identify the criminal process, this search for the needle in the haystack is pretty successful. What relevance does such evidence have for legal cases? Well, practice has already proved it that even the course of a trial could be changed by the retrieval of deleted e-mail messages for instance.

Data forensics constantly needs to face apparently unsurmountable challenges. The applications are indeed far-reaching, but the work to extract digital evidence is strict and exhausting. Sometimes the necessary information is buried deep in the corporate electronic system, or sometimes, even if it is physically identifiable it is difficult to separate and analyze extensively, off line. Moreover, for a successful data collection, data forensics has to protect the extracted elements by duplication so that the information is preserved and not altered and spoiled during the process. Great caution, strict standards and lots of skills are required for each of these steps and only the best in the field can succeed.

A data forensics expert should be contacted immediately, once a breach in the security system or a criminal act against electronic media is detected. This will reduce the costs of data collection and will make info recovery more likely. Moreover, it is false to assume that data forensics only applies to computer hard drives as the main systems that can store information. There are cases of criminal action involving, USB devices, CDs, DVDs and even voice mail systems. Even photocopy machines include hard drives and the scanned or copied documents can be afterwards retrieved from them.

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