Will Ascenzo
Will is the lead blogger, copywriter, and copy editor for Gillware Data Recovery and Digital Forensics, and a staunch advocate against the abuse of innocent semicolons.
Encrypted Data Recovery: The Case Study That Destroyed Humanity
Recently, a potential client contacted us, wondering if we could recover data from their Apricorn Aegis Secure Key 3.0 USB drive. The USB flash drive itself was in perfect condition. However, the data was inaccessible because the device was password-protected…
Who Gets Your Data After Death? Accessing and Managing a Deceased Person’s Digital Remnants
Updated: 1/3/2019 When a loved one passes away, dealing with the mundane little things is an unfortunate, and often headache-inducing, necessity. Canceling a deceased loved one’s bills and magazine subscriptions, dealing with their financial situations… And now you have to worry about…
Crashed Hard Drive Recovery: A Tale of Basketball-Induced Hard Drive Failure
We’ve seen many a crashed hard drive come from dropped laptops. It just comes with the territory—a portable device with a small data storage device inside it, filled with sensitive moving parts. You drop it—it breaks (usually). What a relief…
Samsung M3 Data Recovery: Recovering Encrypted Files from SecretZone
Our client in this data recovery case had been the proud owner of a Samsung M3 external hard drive. Then the external drive took a tumble off of their desk and hit the floor. In a matter of seconds, our…
Overwritten File Recovery: Identity Crisis
The client in this data recovery case study came to us to help them get back a number of photos they’d accidentally overwritten. They’d had a handful of photos in one folder, and a handful of photos in another folder,…
There Be Dragons in the Cloud—What Can We Learn from Amazon S3?
On February 28, 2017, Amazon Web Services’s servers decided to celebrate Mardi Gras in an unusual way. A problem in one of AWS’s massive data centers in northern Virginia led to widespread outages, with far-reaching consequences. Amazon’s web hosting services…
“No Operating System Found” Boot Error
“No Operating System Found”—Anatomy of a Hard Drive Boot Error When you get a “no operating system found” error message, your computer is telling you, in very plain English, what it is seeing. You booted it up, it looked for…
Cloudbleed: What It Means for Users and MSPs
On February 23, 2017, Cloudflare, an internet company providing essential infrastructure and services to thousands of websites, announced it had found and rectified a bug in its software source code. The so-called Cloudbleed bug allowed data to “leak” from sites relying on…
Windows 10 Data Recovery: Corrupt User Profile
There are some days where it just feels like technology has developed a vendetta against you. Our client in this data recovery case was having one of those days. Their Windows 10 PC had been acting up. The final straw:…