Sustainable automated data recovery: a research roadmap

Digital devices contain increasingly more data and applications. This means more data to handle and a larger amount of different types of traces to recover and consider in digital forensic investigations. Both present a challenge to data recovery approaches, requiring higher performance and increased flexibility. In order to progress to a long-term sustainable approach to automated data recovery, this paper proposes a partitioning into manual, custom, formalized and self-improving approaches. These approaches are described along with research directions to consider: building universal abstractions, selecting appropriate techniques and developing user-friendly tools.