When you use your computer for any activity, you leave behind the traces of your activity. Anybody with proper tools can reveal all of your activity, the files you opened or saved, the external storage devices you used, the websites you visited, movies you watched and more. The open-source Autopsy is such a forensics software that can analyze a hard disk and find out all the information that is invisible to the ordinary users.
Autopsy is actually a GUI front-end for another open-source collection of forensic tools called The Sleuth Kit. Autospy makes it easy for anyone to use these tools. Even though only forensic experts would be interested in this type of software to analyze a confiscated computer or hard disk, ordinary users can also find it very useful because it can be used to recover deleted files from a number of storage devices like memory card, digital camera or external hard drives.
Autospy works on Linux, Windows and Mac. Installation is very easy and you can further enhance it by installing addition modules. You do not have to have a physical disk available for analysis as it can also work with disk images. As soon as you pick one of the storage devices or their images, it starts to analyze them. The analysis may take short or long time depending on the capacity of the source disk.
It will display all the possible details stored inside the hard drive or their images. You can view and recover deleted files, documents, pictures, videos, and other documents. It can also analyze web browser data and display cookies, bookmarks, email-addresses, browsing history etc. It can view even hidden partitions and shows you if the user connected any devices to the computer.
Conclusion: Autopsy is a very powerful forensic software for analyzing hard drives, memory cards and other media devices. It is open-source and works on Windows, Linux and Mac making it an ideal tool to recover deleted files on a number of data storage devices.
You can download Autospy from https://www.sleuthkit.org/autopsy/.