Image and Hold…Preservation Bliss

Computers, cell phones, tablets, digital recorders, surveillance cameras, memory sticks, USB devices, internet email accounts, social media accounts, cloud accounts, gaming consoles, websites, etc. commonly come into play these days in a variety of investigative matters.  Investigative matters include: bankruptcy, class actions, compliance, contract, criminal, defamation, legal discovery, domestic relations, employee terminations, fraud, harassment, improper use of corporate assets, intellectual property infringement, internal investigations, malpractice, negligence, intellectual property theft, shareholder disputes, wage disputes, workers compensation and wrongful death claims.

After working with many clients over the years across all kinds of industries, one common theme is present among their thought process when dealing with a potential situation, “This situation will probably never make it to court.” In many situations, our clients kick themselves for not preserving data that would have been helpful in their investigation when they first had an idea something was going on. In the world of data, information doesn’t necessarily live forever.

For example, when a file or email is deleted from a system, it is in jeopardy of being unrecoverable forever, even with computer forensics digital archiving can still be impossible. Another example I come across is network logging in an organization. Many times IT people setup logging that records events for any given day, however, due to storage limitations oftentimes because of tight budgets, logs are set to be deleted within hours or days due to the space they require. These logs can demonstrate actions taken by specific users both internal and external to an organization.

The image and hold is designed to take a “snapshot” of data at a point in time. Image and holds can be made of pretty much any type of data! The snapshots can be made in a relatively inexpensive and quick manner in most situations. These snapshots allow an investigator to perform analysis as if the original device was right in front of us even though the device, website or data is long gone from the original system!

Contact Vestige today to find out about digital image & hold preservation, archiving!