Informative Articles About Digital Forensics Litigation Support
Tips For Data Recovery
Anytime your hard drive crashes or you lose your data, you’ll need to turn to data recovery to properly restore your information. Data recovery is something most computer users are familiar with, as a majority of us have had to turn to data recovery at some point in time. Even though hard drives are becoming better and better, they are still mechanical and will always encounter problems. The first thing to do, before any problems happen, is to always back up your data. If you create backups of your information, you’ll be well prepared in the event of a disaster. This way, even if your hard drive cannot be repaired and the data is lost forever, you’ll have the back ups to continue going as normal. If you didn’t make back ups, you’ll find the situation very traumatic when you discover that your data cannot be recovered. Most hard drives will last for years before they start to encounter any type of malfunction or hardware problems. You can help prevent data loss by turning off your computer when it isn’t in use, or shutting it down when you hear the hard drive making an odd noise. If the hard drive starts to malfunction, letting it continue to run will only do more damage. If you shut it off immediately and take it to a specialist, you’ll have a much better chance of getting…
Read MoreThe Evaluation Process Of Data Recovery
As most people already know, almost all hard drives fail due to normal use and conditions. Although it can happen at anytime, hard drive failure normally takes several years to occur, due to normal wear and tear. No matter what the case may be, you should always be fully aware of the options that are available to you, and what you should do if your hard drive fails. Data recovery is the most useful and by far the best way to retrieve data that has been lost or deleted from a hard drive. Hard drive recovery can restore files that have been lost, no matter what the cause may be. From viruses to crashes, data recovery can restore the files on your hard drive by rebuilding the platters and the structure of the drive. Most experienced computer technicians can restore your hard drive in just a couple of days. Before you hard drive can be rebuilt, it must be evaluated. The evaluation process will give the technician a chance to go through your hard drive, determine what caused the failure, and what they need to do to restore your data. This is a very extensive process that involving a series of steps performed by the technician. First things first, the technician must determine if the problem is logical, physical, or possibly a combination of both. Physical failures result in hardware malfunctions, while the…
Read MoreData Recovery & Forensic Recovery Explained
The advances in communication that have been made in the last two decades created a new branch of detectives. These are electronic detectives, and they are required because electronic communication almost replaced the written hard copy form of communication, the majority of corporate data onlyexisting in electronic format. Because of this, hard disk data recovery experts have become a required aid for detectives or they became electronic detectives themselves. The computer has become a focal point for investigations or for corporations to identify their employs activities. Nowadays, a significant part of corporate investigations is the data recovery process. Through data recovery, a volume of data can be obtained and evidence can be found in documents that might be relevant to the investigation. The data recovery process ensures a mass of important information that can be used. There are a number of terms used to describe the data on a hard disk based on its state. “Active Data”, is used to describe the data form that is accessible to the user of the computer. The term “Recovered Data” is used to describe the information that has been recovered after it has been deleted from the Active Data. This data is either in a very easy to recognize format, entire files, or an expert will be required to interpret it as it is in bits and pieces. The last type of term is “Unused” and…
Read MoreYour Data Recovery Guidelines
Data recovery, according to the word sleuths and data recovery experts, is the process of salvaging deleted or inaccessible data stored on damaged media like magnetic disks and computer hard drives, optical devices, and tape cartridges. If you need your data to be recovered fast, certain data recovery service companies can do this but most of the time there is an additional cost or a different package depending on how fast they can give you back your files. There are several reliable hard disk data recovery specialists that will notify you when they think that the data can be recovered yourself and will guide and give you information on how to do it. Hard drive data recovery services are companies that work to make sure that all of your sensitive data can be restored if your system ever crashes. If you have decided upon using a data recovery service, you should know that that you will get a good portion, if not all of your data back. But if the drive is physically damaged and then the only hope that you have is to take it to a data recovery service where experts might be able to get your data off for you. In the worst scenario where you delete your most important files, data recovery software is capable of performing an extensive search on your hard drive to locate the pieces of…
Read MoreEmergence of E-Discovery In Civil Litigation
The law, as a means of administering dispute resolution and criminal accountability, must be able to adapt to revolutions of industry or technology. We are currently in the beginning years of a technological revolution that will only grow and continue to change the way humans live their lives. Computer and internet use have changed the way that people and business think and act. In today’s judicial system, a case (either civil or criminal) is often decided by the evidence produced and discovered prior to trial. As computers have become the integral components of any successful business operation, the records on those computers have become more difficult to discover. Not only because of the difficulty of gaining access to an adversary’s computer records, but also because many seasoned attorneys do not even know what to look for when they do gain access. Adding to the confusion is a lack of guiding procedural and case law. New methods of discovery have hampered older, traditional attorneys who carry with them the knowledge and experience from the days of paper and pen. The old rules are obsolete, and in today’s world if you can not keep up with the technology and developments in the law then you will be left as ineffectual as the paper and pen you hold in your hand. In response to the increased demands for structure in E-discovery, the ABA has proposed new…
Read MoreChallenges in Recovering Deleted Email
Both computer forensics experts and data recovery technicians seek to recover deleted data. Data recovery is primarily interested in bringing back files, while computer forensics tends to dig deeper, looking not just for deleted documents, but also for metadata (data about data – such as file attributes, descriptions, dates, and other information) and meaningful snippets of unrecoverable files. One area of particular interest is email. When most documents are written to a computer’s hard disk, each newly created document has its own directory entry (what the user sees as a listing in a folder). If a file has been deleted, but has not been overwritten by another document, the recovery process is a relatively trivial part of e-discovery or of data recovery. But when the data of interest is from deleted email, the discovery process is likely to differ significantly from that of data recovery. Individual emails are stored differently than individual files. Different types of email programs store data differently on the user’s hard disk and require different schemes for finding useful information. As a result, the deletion of emails and recovering of deleted emails differs not only from that for other types of documents, but also between different types of email programs. There are three main types of email in common usage – Microsoft Outlook (often paired with a Microsoft Exchange Server), text-based email client programs, and web-based email, or webmail.…
Read MoreThe Sedona Conference® Publishes The Sedona Principles Second Edition Addressing Electronic Discovery
The Sedona Conference has published a second edition of its iconic The Sedona Principles: Best Practices Recommendations & Principles for Addressing Electronic Document Production (June 2007), which is available via download at www.thesedonaconference.org. The Sedona Conference is a nonprofit group, created in 1997, to tackle complex legal (primarily litigation) issues. The latest update is a product of Sedona Conference’s Working Group One, an informal, “minithink tank” established in 2002 to provide a forum for jurists, lawyers, experts, and academics to address emerging problems and “best practices” in e-discovery. From an initial membership of about 20, WG1’s roster has grown to several hundred members, including consultant Craig Ball (author of LTN’s Ball in Your Court column); Ariana Tadler, a partner at Milberg Weiss; and Jonathan Redgrave, of Redgrave Daley Ragan & Wagner, among others. I am a founding member of WG1 and served as one of the editors of the update. The original 2004 version of The Sedona Principles established 14 e-discovery “principles.” The revision reflects the ramifications of the 2006 EDD amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and attempts to address the rule changes without compromising the perspective of the original document’s authors. Here are highlights: PRESERVATION STANDARDS The Sedona Principles continue to provide de facto national standards for preservation obligations. Sedona Principle 5 provides that “reasonable and good faith efforts” are required to accomplish preservation, but it is “unreasonable to…
Read MoreAre You Ready for E-Discovery?
If you’re like most of us in IT, you probably have a relatively small number of individuals in your firm that you’re used to working with fairly closely. For example, if you’re a development manager, you probably work closely on a daily basis with the business folks to understand their requirements for the systems you develop. If you’re a network architect, you might work closely with software architects in order to optimize the network to support the applications that people use daily. However, no matter where you are in IT and no matter what firm you work for, chances are that one area of the firm you don’t work closely with is inside counsel — in other words, legal. Now, that’s not to say that there’s never any interaction between these two areas. For example, in the case of human resource investigations or employee terminations, both areas might be brought in to perform a certain role. However, if you’re an IT person and you have a speed dial, chances are that nobody from the legal team is on it. Get ready, though, because new rules for data discovery could be about to change all that. What Is E-Discovery? E-discovery is, simply, discovery of digital evidence. As electronic artifacts — documents, e-mail , instant messages and others — make up the vast majority of correspondence and record-keeping in most firms, it would make sense…
Read MoreReduce E-Discovery Costs: Organize Data Before Litigation Starts
Annually, the lack of policies and procedures assuring easy discovery of all pertinent electronic records is costing companies tens of thousands of dollars in this litigious society. In today’s world, the details of business transactions and negotiations are recorded electronically through e-mails and text messages. Companies of old had clerical staff and warehouses dedicated to document storage and cross indexing. Today, individual hard drives and network servers perform the function of storage, but lack the ability to properly cross index correspondence. Companies should consider encouraging, or even requiring, employees to organize their e-mails and other electronic data in folders corresponding with the transactions in which they relate. Organizing e-mails and other data can make it much easier for counsel to retrieve, filter and evaluate data related to transactions at issue reducing costs. To understand how this works in practice, consider the following scenario: Company A has five employees involved in a transaction that becomes litigious. None of the employees organize their e-mails or electronic data in a way that makes it easy to separate out the data related to the transaction at issue. The lawyers for Company A thus have to pull all of the data off hard and shared drives, and then apply search terms to find the data in question. It would not be unusual for this data to be in the range of 5-10 gigabytes of information. Law firms typically…
Read MoreeDiscovery, IT and What to Do About It
The new Federal Rules of Electronic Discovery will be a burden to IT but you can mitigate the fallout, writes CIO Update guest columnist Michael Sears of Mathon Systems.Have you heard the new Lawyer joke: What do you call a lawyer who likes the new federal rules of eDiscovery? Plaintiff’s counsel. Okay, not very funny. But it makes a point. The new federal rules are changes only lawyers who sue companies tend to like. Other lawyers, like the ones who work in your General Counsel’s office are not that happy about them. And maybe those who work in the CIO’s shop feel the same way. On December 1, 2006, after several years of review by the legal industry, and agreement with the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Congress, new Rules of Electronic Discovery became the model rules that federal courts follow. If history is any guide, state courts will also soon adopt most, if not all, of these provisions. These rules take into consideration the major technical innovations effecting digital files and documents over the past few years. They change the game for storage and records retention, as well ongoing litigation support within your company. It’s critical that you are aware of the impact of these new rules, and understand both the positive and negative consequences of them. Most major corporations today hold more than 3TBs of user data and messages. Trends…
Read MoreContact us
(Free initial consultation – no spam)
Contact form (1)
"*" indicates required fields