You bring up two important aspects of this system you hadn't mentioned before: backups and evidence.
If you have evidence from a 2007 murder that was used in a 2009 trial but was somehow "changed" in 2012, it would really be good if you could account for that change. If you are responsible for producing "point-in-time" backups ("Where is the document shown to the jury in 2009?") you'd likely want more of a version control system where you could diff changes rather that store "the last valid document."
The chances are that the 2012 changes are perfectly innocent -- saving a new print configuration, for example -- but storing diffs of these documents is inexpensive and efficient.
On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 8:08 AM, Kevin J Cully kjcully@cherokeega.com wrote:
Not a silly question.
Some background: We have to archive documents for various lengths of time. For a murder case, it's basically forever. When searching for a file from 2007, the file wasn't valid. Not a problem in this case in that they still had the hard copy of the file so they re-scanned it. I wasn't involved with the research of this file, but let's just imagine that the file existed but it was filled with garbage characters. (Worst case scenario.)
The way our offsite long-term backup system works, is that they will keep versions of a file that have changed in the last 30 days. After that, they start removing older files until the most current file is 30 days old and they will keep that forever. BUT, what if that current file is corrupted, and the older files were valid? It'd be better to know earlier than later.
Why wouldn't a file be valid?
- Zero bytes long
- Mis constructed header
- Garbage filled file
- Truncated file
- Other file format saved with wrong extension
... more
Thanks everyone for their feedback!
-----Original Message----- From: ProFox [mailto:profox-bounces@leafe.com] On Behalf Of Chris Davis Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2016 5:15 PM To: profox@leafe.com Subject: Re: Common File Document Validation
Might be a silly question but if you found a file which wasn't valid, what you going to do?
Why wouldn't a file be valid?
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