As you continue to use your computer in your everyday life, you keep storing fragments of information about your daily activity. For example, if you watch some videos in Windows or send email messages to someone, this information can be stored in a number of places on the hard disk. Your PC can hold years of user activity and other hidden data without you knowing about it. Even the cleanup utilities like CCleaner might not clean all of this data. If you want to know what kind of data about your everyday activities is hiding in your PC, then you can use the PassMark OSForensics software.
OSForensics is a forensics investigation tool (the kind you see Abby Sciuto use in the popular TV show NCIS) using which you can uncover hidden information in any Windows PC. It uses very advanced techniques like hash matching, drive signatures comparisons to help you easily and quickly extract forensic evidence. It offers a number of search functions to find recent computer and internet activity (web site visits, downloads, logins), recovery of deleted files, password recovery of website logins, decryption of Office documents, browse the volume shadow copies to find the old versions of the modified files.
Since installation of the OSForensics software on a PC is going to overwrite some of the files, it also offers a portable mode. Using the portable mode, you can keep OSForensics on your USB pen drive and use it on any PC. The user interface makes it easy for you to pick the various functions from the left side of the window. In the main GUI, you will find all the tools categorized based on the nature of their functions. For example, there are categories like Case Management, File Searching & Indexing, Hashing & File Identification, Viewers, System Artifacts & Passwords and so on.
Conclusion: OSForensics is an advanced and complicated software that only very advanced users will find useful. It can be used to see what kind of hidden information your PC is holding and that can be collected by forensic investigators.
You can download PassMark OSForensics from http://www.osforensics.com/.