Julia, you're Chief Developer at ReclaiMe. Could you tell our readers a bit about your role, and what an average day looks like?
Actually, ReclaiMe is not that big a company and the chief developer position is not limited to developing algorithms for data recovery and analysis. The scope of my responsibility also includes planning development strategies; that is, what area of forensic data recovery we will study next. Also, I am responsible for the technical support and based on this I suggest what to improve or add to our flagship product – ReclaiMe Pro.My typical day starts with a cup of coffee, then I look through e-mails and schedule tech support sessions for the day. The first line tech support department leaves for me to have a look the most complex cases. Generally, forensic data recovery cases are more complex compared to home users’ cases and, more than that, a forensic investigator is more educated than a home user. So it is not surprising that typically I deal with non-trivial tasks often requiring non-trivial solutions. Thanks to those cases we can improve our forensic data recovery algorithms.
What first sparked your interest in digital forensics?
Actually, we were, we are, and we shall be focused on data recovery. We have come to forensic recovery recently after we had analyzed the number of support requests from e-discovery companies. By communicating with our clients we realized that although there are many forensic computer software options, often their capabilities as to data recovery are quite limited. Such tools are good at analyzing data, making reports and the like; however data recovery, especially in complex cases such as data recovery from a many terabyte multidisc storage device, is sometimes lacking.
Recently you have added new forensic capabilities into ReclaiMe Pro. Could you tell us a bit more?
Yes, this is true. ForensicFocus members gave us a tip on how we can improve ReclaiMe Pro as to forensic capabilities and we have added several forensic features like file content classification along with file testing, and filtering recovered files by hash lists. We also added what we call “traces”, essentially a log of which file data came from what location on disk.
What are ReclaiMe's plans for the near future? What new developments can we expect to see over the next year or so?
In the near future we, as always, plan to be the first in developing new algorithms and solutions for data recovery. In particular, in the coming month our customers will see a new opportunity in ReclaiMe Pro – data recovery from Drobo devices. Such devices have been popular among users all over the world for a long time; however, due to the complexity of the storage system used in Drobo, until now there was no data recovery solution on the market – a couple of big companies claim that they have some tools for Drobo recovery, but only for internal use. Now, with the release of a new version ReclaiMe Pro, forensic experts will have the possibility to work with Drobo.
Finally, what do you do in your spare time?
I am a mother of two boys that’s why all my spare time I spend on active games – in summer we play football, swim in the pool, run, and fool around; in winter we ski or have a snowball fight. We also love to travel together, and our rule here is the warmer the better.
Julia Pakhomova is Chief Developer at ReclaiMe, which provides multipurpose data recovery options for corporate and individual clients, as well as free RAID recovery software.
