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Paragon Software releases free APFS SDK Community Edition for forensic experts

Paragon Software Group has released Paragon APFS SDK Community Edition – a free source code on Github that opens access to the regularly updated SDK libraries for Windows, macOS, Linux, RTOS, and UEFI environments.

Paragon APFS SDK Community Edition grants read access to APFS-formatted drives, solving interoperability and cross-platform communication problems, empowering applications with instant and seamless connectivity to APFS-storage media on non-Apple platforms. The SDK license is targeted towards forensic experts and others who need read access to APFS-formatted data.

In forensic computing and, especially, in the field of postmortem data retrieval, the reconstruction of lost or deleted files is of key importance for investigators, the company states. There are various techniques that can be used to retrieve data and these depend on the characteristics and limitations of each file system.

Most file systems —FAT16/32, NTFS, Ext2/3/4, HFS+ — are well-known and can be easily retrieved. There are also various technologies and tools for retrieving data formatted with those file systems.

APFS is the new Apple file system used on all latest iOS and starting with macOS High Sierra devices. For APFS, forensic file recovery methodologies have not been developed as of yet. Paragon Software has developed new forensic file recovery methods and one of them is the APFS SDK Community Edition. The company says it is continuing further research and development in this direction to enable full read and write APFS access, to be released soon.