Thanks for the prompt reply... So would there be software available though that can search the hard drive for deleted items and give a time stamp of when the data was deleted?
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How to find out if files have been transferred and /or deleted from PC
Hello.. I have a laptop that was taken without authorization and returned a couple of hours later, and I suspect files may have been transferred to an external hard drive and /or deleted from it. Is there anyway to find out if this has been done, and if it has been, can i find out what files have been transferred / deleted?
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Answers
I don't think so. I don't recall any particular way of tracking WHEN a file was deleted. Just that it was deleted. And again, that depends on how much use the machine has had since the file was deleted.
(unless special software is used, when files are deleted, the space that they occupy is "marked" as free but the contents is not actually removed. If the system hasn't written to that free space yet, then you can recover the file).
Also like to share to track such traces of actions, you can turn on auditing to track specific actions (or any actions but this affects performance of the machine). Take a look at this fine article on the setp by step configuration to trace deletion of specific files (in folder).
<http://www.intelliadmin.co
OR in general (as a local machine policy) take a look at Microsoft policy recommendations, the rest to correlate the logs are similar as in first link
<http://support.microsoft.c
There is date/timestamp for the above as well included in the audit log.
If you want to actively keep track of files deleted from your system, you may want to consider undelete as well. <http://www.topdrawerdownlo
- By installing Undelete on your system you get the equivalent of version control protection throughout your operating system. The app actively monitors files on your system keeping track of everything that gets deleted so you can always (or almost always) recover a deleted file. It specifically provides version protection for all Microsoft Office documents making it a snap to revert to a previous version of a file or recover something you didn't mean to delete.
Hope it helps
when a file is deleted it isn't actually removed, it is just de-referenced in the file allocation table. on windows machines there is a flag in the file allocation table that is turned on when a file is deleted that can be queried upon. a linux based tool like autopsy with sleuthkit from http://www.sleuthkit.org/ would allow you to take a bit level copy of the drive in question and recreate all of the files that were deleted and identify when. keep in mind that you want to use a copy because any changes that you make to the drive could potentially affect evidence for your enquiry. you cannot detect files that were copied from one drive to another unless you have access to both drives and can synchronise the time stamps in their file allocation tables.
good luck with that, the path that you are going down can be pretty time intensive.
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by: leewPosted on 2008-12-18 at 16:35:12ID: 23209263
Only if you had auditing previously enabled on it. Otherwise, you'd need some kind of third party software that could lock down the data and log when it's copied. DriveLock is one such product. But again, if you didn't have third party software or Auditing enabled to begin with, then there is NO WAY you can tell if someone copied information from the system. As for deleted data, you may be able to check for files to "undelete" but there is no guarantee that you'll find them or that they wouldn't have been legitimately deleted before the laptop went missing.