A report detailing issues retrieving data from a damaged hard drive, affected by accidental drop and technical failures during recovery efforts. Quoting directly: Hard Drive 19. The emails that were withheld in full were stored on an external hard drive for processing purposes. 20. The hard drive in question was dropped accidentally and is no longer operational. As a result, the data on the hard drive is no longer accessible. When the hard drive is plugged in, it makes a whirring, scraping sound and the computer does not recognize that the device has been plugged in. Files on the hard drive were last accessed on November 29, 2024. 21. USPIS made multiple attempts to recover the data from the hard drive. Two employees from USPS IT were contacted to see if data could be retrieved from the hard drive, but they were unsuccessful. The USPIS Assistant Lab Director overseeing the Digital Evidence Unit was also contacted to see if the data could be retrieved, but they informed us that data retrieval was outside the scope of their abilities. Geek Squad and an external data recovery company were contacted, and the final outcome was that the drive had media damage (including critical areas), so they were not able to read data off the drive. 22. The Department of Justice (“DOJ”) also attempted to retrieve the data from the hard-drive. The Office of Litigation Support in-house data forensics lab was unable to retrieve any data, so they sent the hard drive to a separate company who they co