Re: recommendations/experience with CD/DVD autoloader

Glenn Dardick wrote:
> As the drives are getting larger and larger it is becoming more of a
> pain to submit forensic images on optical media.  Any
> thoughts/experience with the following:
>
> 1) preference/insistence by courts of forensic images on specific type
> of media (hard disk drive, optical media, tape)
>
> 2) pricing/reliability/recommendations of cd/dvd autoloader to automate
> copying of image files to DVD's
>
> Thanks
>
> Glenn S. Dardick
>
>
>   
As of recent I have been unimpressed with the long term reliability of 
archiving to DVD or CD, the fact that the archive resides on multiple 
pieces of media means that there are more opportunities for a single 
piece of that media to go bad and compromise the entire dataset.... I 
have moved away from these optical formats for large data sets and have 
moved back to tape. It gives me the ability to reliably store larger 
data sets on a single piece of media that can be easily recovered.... In 
terms of formats accepted from a court perspective. all that really 
matter is that the image can be produced for discovery or for the court 
proceedings.. you can alway recover the the image and place it onto a 
hard drive or other media provided by the discovery side or for court. 
The biggest part is to be able to reproduce it after it has been sitting 
around for a few years, tapes have a known history for this..... DVD and 
burned CD history is not a known quantity yet.

thats my two cents.