Hunter Biden had MacBooks
So, the ‘hard drives’ aren’t hard drives. They are solid state drives (all chips).
You can make a ‘copy’ of it, including the areas that have been ‘erased’ like you can a physical hard drive, and analyze the segments of data still stored but not actually physically destroyed yet by the write over process.
So, it’s possible that they were able to recover more data. They can use a similar process for things stored on the chips of your phone.
Yes, but that means everyone did a sector by sector copy. Skeptical of that. If it was a logical volume partition copies, then all the deleted file header stuff and associated blocks would never have been copied.
The thing about solid state drives is that they are like ram but don’t require power to stay in whatever state they are in. Each bit is a transistor. Regular ram needs to be refreshed constantly or it is lost. Solid state drives don’t have to be refreshed ever.
The problem with the non refreshing also called static memory is that the transistors wear out after repeated use. The drive keeps track of which parts of the drive have been used and makes sure to spread the usage over the whole drive so that the transistors wear out at about the same time.
The result is that deleted data is left in place and new data is written at a part of the drive that has not previously been used or has been used less. It is entirely possible to never use the same memory twice depending on the age of the computer and how much capacity the drive has. I would guess that a Biden would buy the one with 256 gigabytes.
It’s also possible that Hunter moved files to the trash and then never emptied the trash. That way the files would never actually be deleted and you could copy the hard drive without any special utilities. You would beed a bit copy utility to completely duplicate a solid state drive.
My money is on Hunter being too stupid to empty the trash or the deleted items folder in his email program. I could see him creating and deleting until the disk is full and causing errors that make him take it to a computer technician. I see things like this all the time from people who have masters degrees.