Copy host protected area of a disk drive as well.Make at least two images of digital evidence.Create a duplicate copy of your evidence image file.Ask your client attorney or your supervisor what is required-you usually only have one chanceĬontingency Planning for Image Acquisitions *Ĭontingency Planning for Image Acquisitions.If you cannot retain the disk, make sure you make the correct type of copy (logical or bitstream).In civil litigation, a discovery order may require you to return the original disk after imaging it.When working with large drives, an alternative is using tape backup systems.Use MD5 or SHA-1 hash to verify the image.
Inability to share an image between different tools.Investigator name, case name, comments, etc.Can integrate metadata into the image file.With data integrity checks in each segment.Can split an image into smaller segmented files.Option to compress or not compress image files.
Validation check must be stored in a separate file.
Commercial tools use more retries than free tools.Low threshold of retry reads on weak media spots.Tools might not collect marginal (bad) sectors.Requires as much storage as original disk or data.Most computer forensics tools can read raw format.Can ignore minor data read errors on source drive.Bit-by-bit copy of the drive to a file.This is what the Linux dd command makes.Terms used for a file containing evidence data.But RAM data has no timestamp, which makes it much harder to use.Also, collecting RAM data is becoming more important.Cannot be repeated exactly-alters the data.Now the preferred type, because of hard disk encryption.Does not alter the data, so it's repeatable.