Lost GPS data: forensics and reconstruction

Request: „Recover the GPS data from the old logger.“

1. Image the media and search for traces — in two character encodings, not just one.
2. Record the null result honestly: the original is lost.
3. Reconstruct the route from secondary sources — photos, bookings, a routing service.
4. Delete the 227 GB of raw images after the proof, not before.

A trip through 26 US states whose trace had vanished with an old hard drive.

Deciding when the search is over, and the approval to delete.

The first null result was a search error — the search read only one character encoding; even the corrected search did not find the original.

A negative finding is only a result once the search itself has been verified — otherwise it is a search error with a date.

The GPS trace of a trip through 26 US states had vanished with an old hard drive. The AI imaged the media and searched — the first null result turned out to be a search error, because only one character encoding was read. The corrected search still came up empty: the original is lost. So it reconstructed the route from photos, bookings and a routing service: roughly 5,786 kilometres, explicitly labelled as an estimate. Only after that proof were 227 gigabytes of raw images deleted.