Well it's not the finest of conditions for working with but sometimes you don't know what you will find until you get there....
When I arrived in Kent the other week to perform some data recovery I showed up in a suit jacket and trousers and a shirt etc. I was slightly concerned when the people on site pointed me in the direction of a couple of shipping containers and especially when the security guard smiled at what I was wearing. The shipping containers were full of a fine black powder which had been mixed with rainwater and had subsequently become a fascinating black sludge which seemed to be able to travel invisibly through the air as well as remain attached to anything it came in contact with until the end of time. The smell was what can only be described as incredible and the items to be removed were all unwrapped on the floor of the container in a sort of shallow swamp. It is a testimony to modern technology that we were able to recover data from the hard disks that were contained in the desktop PCs in the swamp and in the most part the data was recovered completely. When you are looking for incriminating data on a company or person(s) then you are usually prepared to scour every PC in the company on the off-chance you may find something.
The company we were examining was of particular interest to government agencies as well as the Police and so all of these PCs were worth investigating. The PCs in the most part had nothing too interesting on as the data was stored on the network servers but the local email PST files and internet cache held interesting data. You never know were data will show up as in all of these cases you do not know what systems they are using (especially if they find out in advance you are are coming to site) as software and or data is often deleted or removed. Sometimes cases arrive at our door where the client has not even bothered to remove the file shredding software when we find the PCs as there is nothing to be proved by the presence of such software, just a possible intent.
Well the data recovered gave rise to a new lead but the most important realisation of the day was definitely to always have overalls in the car just in case...