Google Vault for Data Retention and E-Discovery - Gmail Data

Businesses using the Google workspace can use the Vault application to set data retention guidelines; implement litigation holds; and search for and export relevant data. Vault will provide these services for Gmail; Google Drive; Google Chat; and Google Voice [a telephone service with voicemail].

Vault applies certain rules for messages collected from Gmail:

1. While all Gmail messages will be saved in Vault, only the first 1 MB of each message will be indexed. Attachments will be indexed if the message text is less than 1 MB, but 1 MB is the limit for the complete message. The file names of audio, images, and video files will be indexed but their content will not.

2. If a Gmail message links to a file saved in Google Drive, Google Photos, or YouTube, Vault will not save a copy of it.

3. Google Calendar events; Google Sheets, and Google Docs which are emailed from the applications themselves will not be saved in Gmail by default.

4. Vault will only retain messages sent in confidential mode (where the body is replaced with a secure link) if they were sent after November 30, 2018. If messages are set to expire or the recipients' access is revoked, they will still be retained in Vault.

5. Gmail will automatically generate labels so messages can be easily categorized. So messages with account information will be automatically labeled as 'Finance'. Users can also assign labels to emails.

TIFF Image Compression

TIFFs are raster images: if you zoom in on a TIFF image you’ll see that it is composed of very small pixels arranged on a grid to form patterns on a page. TIFF images are widely used in document databases, and several different compression techniques can be used to make large sets of TIFF images easier to store on drives and servers.

1. TIFFs can use CCITT Group 4 compression, another form of lossless compression, but only for black & white images. CCITT Group 3 is commonly used for fax machine images.

2. TIFFs can also use LZW compression. Lempel–Ziv–Welch is an algorithm which performs lossless data compression. The original image can be fully recreated from the compressed version. LZW can compress grayscale and color RGB images as well. This method is good for computer generated files.

3. Packbits is another lossless compression method which can work with bitonal, grayscale, and color images. Packbits is lossless but will not compress as much as LZW. This method is a good choice for scanned documents. A wide range of applications support Packbits.

4. The JPEG compression method allows for TIFFs to be compressed to differing degrees of compression and image quality. It is ‘lossy’ in the sense that original data is removed for the sake of greater compression. Images can be reduced to 5% of their original size, as opposed to lossless compression which may only lower file size by 50%.

Backup Tapes No Longer As Inaccessible

Backup tapes have long been regarded as an inaccessible format, and so the difficulty and cost of production of relevant data from such tapes may be shifted to the requesting party. The Tip of the Night for September 14, 2015 discussed Judge Scheindlin's seven factor test in Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, LLC, 217 F.R.D. 309 (S.D.N.Y. 2003), to determine if the cost of production should be shifted from the producing party to the party demanding the production. This landmark decision marked backup tapes as an inaccessible form of digital media, and after the 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 26(b) stated that ESI need not be produced if it was not reasonably accessible because of undue burden or cost.

The burden of searching backup tapes may be less for some companies than for others. As Daniel Garrie explains in Are Backup Tapes Accessible in EDiscovery? , companies which have implemented their own in-house backup tape system (rather than delegating the task to an outside vendor) may use it on a regular basis and be familiar enough with the tapes to ease the burden of locating needed data. Retrieval of data from backup tapes used to involve the following steps:

1. Consulting an inventory of the tapes.

2. Determining the software used to create the backup tapes.

3. Calculating how much data was stored on each tape.

4. Restoring and copying the data to an online system.

5. Indexing the data.

6. De-duping the data.

7. Searching through the data.

Recently backup tape systems have been developed which can be indexed without copying data off the tape and on to a network. Index Engines, a company which helps businesses manage their data centers, touts its ability to use automated software to search data tapes onsite without the use of the original software used to create the tapes.