Ethical Hacking Training at InfoSec Institute

Learn to find vulnerabilities before the bad guys do! Gain real world hands on hacking experience in our state of the art hacking lab. Course designed and taught by expert instructors with years of penetration testing experience. 12 student maximum in every class. Certification attempt included in every package.
Computer Forensics Training at InfoSec Institute

Gain the in-demand skills of a certified computer examiner, learn to recover trace data left behind by fraud, theft, and cybercrime perpetrators. Discover the source of computer crime and abuse at your organization so that it never happens again. All of our class sizes are guaranteed to be 12 students or less to facilitate one-on-one interaction with one of our expert instructors.




Computer Forensics Computer-Forensics
[Top] [All Lists]

RE: DVD burner for archival image copies

Subject: RE: DVD burner for archival image copies
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2004 15:31:54 -0500
We have found that there are 2 key elements in the "longevity" of CD-R's.

1. Burn speed. Everything I have read recommends never going over 8x if you
want it to last. We burn all ours at 4x. (I will explain why)

2. The coating on the CD-R. 

We have personally found the Memorex CD-R Blacks are the best for us.

Our test have nothing that is older than 5 years and we have seen those very
old CD-R's fail. 

During our goof-off time one of our testing procedure is this. We have a
very old Music CD player 1993-ish.  We tested all different CD's at
different speeds. Only those burned at 4x or less and FINALIZED consistently
played on that player. Some of the very cheap CD-R would not play at all.

Scratching or exposing the CD-R's to UV's makes all bets off.

Store them Cool and Dry, and if they are extra valuable reburn them every
2-3 years.

Here are to good write-ups on CD-R's.

http://www.melbpc.org.au/pcupdate/2106/2106article14.htm

http://www.mscience.com/survey.html


______________________________________
Dave Kleiman, CISSP, CISM, CIFI, MCSE
www.SecurityBreachResponse.com
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Greg Freemyer [mailto:greg.freemyer@gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 16:30
To: Jerry Shenk
Cc: forensics@securityfocus.com
Subject: Re: DVD burner for archival image copies

I would not assume that DVD backups will have a long life-time.  I have not
seen any field tests of lifetime for DVDs, but for CD-Rom some of the
real-world testing showed they were only reliable for a year or so.

If you do any research on this, be sure to differenciate between
Manufactured DVDs and ones made in a typical DVD writer.  That was the big
difference for CDs.  Manufactured (or pressed) CDs do last a long time, it
is the burned ones that don't.

As far as I know, good tape media is still the preferred archival storage
medium, and even it is only rated for 20 years.  I guess you know a good
tape drive is still pretty expensive.

Greg


On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 22:29:11 -0500, Jerry Shenk
<jshenk@decommunications.com> wrote:
Has anybody used a DVD burner to make archival copies of images on a 
linux-based forensic computer?

What I imagine doing is dumping an image to a DVD(s) after an analysis 
is over so that the image can be archived for an indefinite period of 
time.  I'd think I could use something like "dd 
if=/images/TestCase_hda1.img | dvdrecord -dev=0,0,0 -data -".  
Obviously that doesn't work or I wouldn't be asking the question.

Once I get that working, then I'm gonna want to be able to burn larger 
images to multiple dvds using some combination of the skip and count 
switches...but one thing at a time;)

-----------------------------------------------------------------
This list is provided by the SecurityFocus ARIS analyzer service.
For more information on this free incident handling, management and 
tracking system please see: http://aris.securityfocus.com



-----------------------------------------------------------------
This list is provided by the SecurityFocus ARIS analyzer service.
For more information on this free incident handling, management and tracking
system please see: http://aris.securityfocus.com



-----------------------------------------------------------------
This list is provided by the SecurityFocus ARIS analyzer service.
For more information on this free incident handling, management 
and tracking system please see: http://aris.securityfocus.com

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>