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Training Camp • Cybersecurity Glossary
Unallocated space is disk area not assigned to active files that often retains deleted data, a key forensic source recoverable through file carving.
Unallocated Space Definition: Unallocated space is disk area not assigned to active files that often retains deleted data, a key forensic source recoverable through file carving.
Unallocated space is the portion of a storage device not currently assigned to an active file by the file system, which often still contains remnants of deleted files because deletion typically removes only the file-system pointers rather than the underlying data. In digital forensics it is a valuable source of evidence, recoverable through file carving and other techniques until the sectors are overwritten by new data. Analysts examine it to retrieve deleted documents, fragments, and artifacts of prior activity.
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