Ryan, a computer forensic investigator, was tasked with a case involving the illegal dissemination of...

Option A is the best answer because NAS and SAN environments often rely on RAID-based storage architectures , and CHFI v11 explicitly includes RAID Storage System and RAID and Virtualization as important evidence-related storage topics. When investigating wiped, restored, or distributed storage, understanding the underlying RAID layout, disk order, parity scheme, and storage organization is critical before attempting meaningful recovery or deeper examination.

This is especially true here because the NAS uses a Linux-based filesystem and the SAN may also hold relevant evidence. Without first determining how the data is organized at the storage level, recovery attempts may be incomplete, misleading, or even damaging to the investigation workflow. That makes RAID reconstruction or storage-layout understanding the most logical starting point.

Option B assumes too much about which system matters more. Option C may become necessary later, but the question asks for the best approach to begin given the storage idiosyncrasies. Option D is too narrow and inappropriate for a Linux-based NAS environment. Therefore, the strongest CHFI-aligned starting point is to reconstruct the RAID configurations before attempting recovery .