 FACT: When Fitchs associate is searching Nicks apartment the first  time, he is shown copying the contents of Nicks computer to an  external hard drive. When the hard drive is examined back at their  base of operations, the tech says that "its been erased several  times, but Ill see what I can recover" (or words to that effect.)  This type of data recovery is only possible using the actual  physical hard drive of interest, not a copy of the data from the  drive.