Re: Digital copiers
I can speak with a little authority on this as I have a dozen copier hard drives on my desk right now going through recovery.
The building our local hackerspace is in had a tenant below that was a copier repair place. They moved out in a huff and left dozens of copiers which the landlord turned us loose on the, for parts. As part of that, all the units with hard drives were stripped and saved for me.
Most of them are around 2007 and certainly not the fanciest units but they had 2-10 gig drives.
So far some of them are blank (not sure why, yet), but those with data seem to be mostly buffer rather than full on storage. My experience has been that you can stick a stack of documents into the feeder, it will scan and buffer the documents until you decide to copy, fax, send to server, whatever.
Most of the docs are damaged, but readable as jpgs or gifs. Print jobs sent to it usually are spooled as postscript files.
Different units have different features, but on the predominantly canon units I've got drives for, the data gets overwritten so often, the retention is fairly low so you won't have thousands of docs, but hundreds is a distinct possibility.
Oh, and in case your wondering, I'm doing the forensics for practice but also to get real world data for a talk next month which will involve a sledgehammer on stage with predictable ends.
I can speak with a little authority on this as I have a dozen copier hard drives on my desk right now going through recovery.
The building our local hackerspace is in had a tenant below that was a copier repair place. They moved out in a huff and left dozens of copiers which the landlord turned us loose on the, for parts. As part of that, all the units with hard drives were stripped and saved for me.
Most of them are around 2007 and certainly not the fanciest units but they had 2-10 gig drives.
So far some of them are blank (not sure why, yet), but those with data seem to be mostly buffer rather than full on storage. My experience has been that you can stick a stack of documents into the feeder, it will scan and buffer the documents until you decide to copy, fax, send to server, whatever.
Most of the docs are damaged, but readable as jpgs or gifs. Print jobs sent to it usually are spooled as postscript files.
Different units have different features, but on the predominantly canon units I've got drives for, the data gets overwritten so often, the retention is fairly low so you won't have thousands of docs, but hundreds is a distinct possibility.
Oh, and in case your wondering, I'm doing the forensics for practice but also to get real world data for a talk next month which will involve a sledgehammer on stage with predictable ends.
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