Digital Preservation Q&A - Recent questions tagged forensics

What are best practices for cleaning floppy drive heads?

Wed, 30 Jul 2014 22:40:25 +0000

When working with legacy floppy disks, do you ever clean the drive heads? If so, when? Are there any established best practices for floppy drive maintenance?

Has anyone used a USB bridge & converter cables to writeblock non-USB devices?

Fri, 27 Jun 2014 15:04:54 +0000

Has anybody used a USB forensic bridge (i.e. the Tableau T8-R2) and conversion cables to successfully writeblock a non-USB device? Specifically, I'm wondering if anybody has had any success using SATA/IDE to USB for a desktop hard drive or a Device Side Data FC5025 for 5.25" floppy drives (or similar). Alternatively, does anybody know of a reason it would or wouldn't work?

For context, I'm looking at various hardware writeblockers for a digital collections workstation. Much of our content comes in on USB devices (or disks that play on USB devices), making a USB bridge ideal. I'd also like to have the capacity to deal with other media, though, and I'd rather not have a dedicated SATA/IDE writeblocker gathering dust through disuse.

Is AFF the best choice for digital preservationists who create images?

Thu, 26 Jun 2014 21:01:47 +0000

It seems that AFF is the defacto standard for digital preservationists who create images. Is this true, and is it shifting?

In particular, does or will the depreciation of AFF3 and the discontinuation of maintenance for AFFLIB have any impact on this community?

How do I take a forensic image of an Android smartphone?

Tue, 15 Apr 2014 15:19:51 +0000

I'm trying to take an image of my smartphone since I just changed devices. However, Android phones do not mount as USB drives. The file system can be accessed through the Android Debug Bridge (ADB), but important directories such as /data (where app databases are stored) require root access. I haven't succeeded in grabbing an image with BitCurator. Is this possible? Are there other tools I should be using?

What are the reasons for saving disk images?

Fri, 07 Mar 2014 22:56:38 +0000

Why do digital curators save disk images of legacy
media, as opposed to just copying the file structure of the files on the media?

Originally asked on the Digital Curation Google Group.