arrive at a typical digital forensics unit every month. Seventeen per investigator. And each one holds more data than the last.
By noon, the first drive is still processing.
A single 1 TB device takes 4–6 hours before anyone can even look at it.
By Friday, the queue grew faster than it shrank.
Three to four weeks of backlog is now typical — while cases, victims and courts wait.
And the people who can clear it are the scarcest resource.
The skills gap keeps widening. You can't hire senior examiners fast enough to outrun the data.