Last week, our Directors Steve and Alison had the pleasure of attending Tech Week - Data Recovery and Digital Forensics Conference which was held in Malaga, Spain. The meeting was a great mix of technical training/knowledge sharing, as well as networking with our peers from the Data Recovery community from all over the world. It was also the 30th anniversary of the PC-3000 Technology created by the conference host, Ace Lab. It was really interesting to hear about the history of how the tooling was developed and how far it has changed over the years.
On the first full day of the conference, we were introduced to some new utilities and solutions for Seagate and Western Digital hard drives. We also got to hear about new approaches for data recovery on SSD - hugely important to us as we are starting to see so many more these days. This even included solutions for Intel Optane Memory.
On the second day, there were some very interesting workshops and practical examples of tooling enhancements to enable us to work better with Western Digital in terms of second level translator issues.This is applicable to drives which use SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) Technology, and is typically present on most new WD devices. We also learned about working with Self Encrypted and unsupported SSD.
Some further workshops regarding working with Synology and QNAP storage, and the final set was all about Flash devices. As you can see, it was pretty full-on in terms of technical information, but so useful to see practical examples and live cases being worked with.
In summary, attending the conference is really useful for the Data Recovery professional who wants to keep as up to date as possible with current solutions. We thoroughly enjoyed our time and thank Ace Labs for hosting such a great event.