Computers Notebooks

Monique, thanks for your thoughtful comments!

Regarding people having more data:
It doesn’t make that much sense that people would have more data just because they have bigger hard drives, it’s true. However, I’ve been doing data recoveries for 25 years and it seems that it is true. The average hard drive I see has gone from 10MB to 100GB, and over all that time, they seem to usually be from 1/2 to 2/3 full. Like people’s spending seems to expand to fit their incomes, people’s data seems to expand to fit their storage. A lot of it’s photos & music. A lot of the photos could be actionable evidence. Not so much the music unless your are the RIAA or its ilk.

I agree with you that a million images don’t need to be closely examined when a couple hundred will do. My concern is how effective antiforensics (or privacy) tools may become with ridding a person’s computer of them.

Whether computer forensics firms and e-discovery firms merge is a question of great personal interest to me. I suppose it depends on how a company looks at its business model. A company may decide that its core competency is storage and documentation vs investigation. From this perspective, they’re two very different business models and we’d expect to see more collaborations than mergers.
On the other hand, if a firm looks at the model as litigation support, it might be more likely to want to do both. I know e-discovery companies that dabble with computer forensics, and of course computer forensics involves more than a little e-discovery. I think we’ll have a mix of both types of firms – one-stop shops and collaborating but divergent companies in each field.

Source: Steve Burgess