Apps of computer systems and techniques to gather legal evidence?

Being somewhat of computer expert, I've been told to stay away from this field. Unless you hold specific qualifications as an expert in data recovery (and such), your efforts can be challenged in court (and probably thrown out).

There are many very specific techniques to data recovery, including but not limited to keeping the device in it's recovered state until the process is ready to begin (like keeping a plane's black-box in salt-water until delivered to the recovery team).

Additionally, there is specific hardware designed to *never* write to the media, but only read from it. This is not the same as hooking up a hard drive to your existing computer, because your OS is likely to try to write some information to the "data" drive. Once that happens, your findings are useless.

In the old days disks had write-protect jumpers and such, but not these days.

You can search for apps to recover deleted data (there are lots of good freeware programs out there that I've personally used and have worked great), but it will never pass in court.

Maybe someone else will follow-up my post with a better answer.