Atola TaskForce

The Story of TaskForce in 11 Acts

Looking back at these three years, you notice how fast TaskForce has transformed. From an extremely flexible high-capacity imager with a traditional forensic feature set to an even more productive and innovative tool. TaskForce now offers unique solutions for emerging and long-standing problems of forensic examiners like RAID support and automation.

TaskForce high-performance forensic imager
Atola TaskForce

AFF4 support in Atola TaskForce 2021.4

Atola is pleased to announce the support of AFF4 files in Atola TaskForce, which makes it the second hardware imager able to create AFF4 files after Atola Insight Forensic! Imaging to AFF4 AFF4 is a highly optimized open-source forensic file format with a wide range of benefits: Open-source format: you can describe it in a court Supports multi-pass imaging Fast compression methods: Snappy and LZ4 Block hashes Stores binary zeroes as spans similar to sparse files Vendor-neutral AFF4’s block hashes are calculated for small segments of data on the drive and are stored in a table inside AFF4 metadata and there is a Block map hash that represents a single Read more…

Atola TaskForce

RAID configuration detection in Atola TaskForce

With RAIDs landing on forensic examiners’ desks often being completely anonymous, finding the correct RAID configuration becomes a tedious manual job that can take hours and days to complete.  To make this process efficient and effortless, Atola developers equipped TaskForce forensic imager with a breakthrough configuration autodetection module. This time-saving solution automates the configuration search and allows the operator to focus on the more urgent tasks that require human attention. TaskForce Autodetection module TaskForce’s RAID configuration autodetection process commences immediately upon selection of the RAID members, which can be any combination of devices and image files.  In Stage 1,  the autodetection module reads data on the drives to determine the Read more…

RAID configuration autodetection
RAID 5 imaging session
Atola TaskForce

Imaging RAID 5 with a missing device

When it comes to RAID imaging, a forensic specialist may be confronted with an array that not only has an unknown configuration but also one of the drives severely damaged or missing. This is when Atola TaskForce comes to the rescue! If this is a RAID 5 with a missing device, TaskForce uses the array’s redundancy to create a full image of the RAID. All you need to do is select all available RAID members and click the Add missing device button. Auto detection module will recommence when a new image file or device is added. TaskForce can identify the right configuration and reassemble the RAID, using redundancy. When a Read more…

Atola TaskForce

Imaging RAID 5 array with errors on multiple drives

When imaging RAID 5 array with errors on multiple drives, Atola TaskForce is still able to detect its parameters and image the whole RAID. Let’s examine a case with a RAID 5 consisting of 5 drives, two of which have bad sectors. Reassembling RAID 5 array with errors on multiple drives Click the RAID button in the left-side taskbar and select the drives that make up the RAID array.  TaskForce autodetection module starts running immediately upon selection of the RAID members. In Stage 1, TaskForce reads data on the drives to identify the RAID type. In case it runs across an error, it displays an Error tag next to the corresponding RAID Read more…

Reassembling RAID 5 array