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Using a Write Blocker to View a Hard Drive without Modification

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Let’s assume that you received an external hard drive from a forensic examiner in connection with ongoing litigation. Naturally, the first thing you would want to do would be to plug it in, take a look at its contents and gather information such as the amount and type of data contained on the hard drive before you plan your next steps. You are well aware that you must not modify the contents of the hard drive as this would cause spoliation of electronic evidence. Did you know that the mere act of plugging a hard drive into your computer to view its contents is usually enough to modify its contents?

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Unicode and Character Encodings

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Identifying, collecting, processing and searching in foreign languages have been major shortcomings in most commercial off-the-shelf e-discovery platforms and review tools until very recently. While several platforms have finally made the switch to support multiple languages, a number of tools in the e-discovery technician’s arsenal are still either completely ignorant of character encoding issues or provide only limited support.

Having such weak links in the e-discovery workflow, it is not uncommon to run into documents in an electronic production filled with dreaded question marks or boxes instead of foreign language symbols. Consequently, having a deep understanding of Unicode and character encodings remains to be critical in order to handle electronic documents accurately.

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