Casey Anthony and Unallocated Space
Within the court trail, experts have testified combing the data within Casey Anthony's (and family) computer(s).
They have been looking for evidence related to the court case. Not surprisingly, they found over 3 years worth of history residing on the hard drive.
How does this affect you and your company?
The new name for criminal and corporate evidence is called "E-Discovery". Investigators will examine all electronic records, be it phone, (land,cell,smart) or computer records. These records exist in at least TWO places. One place is obvious - your local device. The second is on the "carrier" or "server". In other words, they can subpoena the phone company or the internet company for records.
This first part is pretty obvious. There isn't much you can do about the records that are "out there" be it on servers or on the internet (example hotmail and yahoo email is located on the web on company servers and is available with or without your consent).
But you are in control of your computer. There are things you can regularly do to clean up your computer.
Understand first of all that everything that you see on your computer screen comes down as a file, as text, as pictures/graphics and as web pages or emails. It will reside there forever.
To a limited extent, you can clean up your computer using Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmentor (Microsoft products). You can delete emails and archive them. You can clean up temporary internet files.
But understand that when you delete something - you are deleting the "pointer" to the data - and not the data itself. If someone sends you a letter that does not have your street number, but has your street, the letter can still be delivered (can be, at the discretion of the post office - grin).
Your house still remains there, just the street number is gone! The same is true with data on a computer. The data is sort of like a page with a page number. If you take away the page number, it is hard to find the page - but it is still there for all to see, if they dig for it.
For more info on learning basic skill sets and recommended programs on cleaning your computer, or to schedule basic maintenance for your computer (cleaning and updating, and speeding it up), contact the author.
Jerrold Schiff
Computer Virus Removal
http://www.schiffkey.com
