.BIN files

Files with the extension .BIN are binary files that software can write data to. .BIN files are also often found on optical discs. These are disk images which are sector by sector copies of source files. A .BIN file is not simply the files and folder structure copied from the source storage medium, but a binary copy of it. It may operate with a cue file (with the extension .cue) that contains metadata about the files on the disc itself.

The Tip of the Night for November 19, 2019 discussed how files can be split into multiple .BIN files which can later be re-combined. Certain types of .BIN files can only be opened by the software which originally created them.

Programs like MagicISO and PowerISO can convert .BIN files to the more common .ISO format. An .ISO file is an archive file used to make a back-up copy of everything on an optical disc. .ISO files can be opened in file compression programs like WinZip or WinRAR.

A .BIN file can be mounted to a computer using a virtual drive software, such as WinCDEmu.

Keep in mind that .BIN files are a means to transfer data. When reviewing data for production, .BIN files should not be part of the end-product.

Evidence of How Bad Manual Document Review Is

The Tip of the Night for December 6, 2018 discussed a study by Herbert Roitblat, Anne Kershaw, and Patrick Oot on to what degree the results of manual document review performed by three teams of individuals corresponded. See, Document Categorization in Legal Electronic Discovery:Computer Classification vs. Manual Review, 61(1) J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 70–80 (2010). A law review article published by Maura Grossman and Gordon Cormack (the well-known authors of a glossary on TAR terms, as mentioned in the Tip of the Night for June 4, 2015) includes a table which does a good job of illustrating the disparity between the content of each review teams' results.

See, Maura R. Grossman & Gordon V. Cormack, Technology-Assisted Review in E-Discovery Can Be More Effective and More Efficient Than Exhaustive Manual Review, 17 Rich. J.L. & Tech 11, 14 (2011). Available at: http://scholarship.richmond.edu/jolt/vol17/iss3/5 . The review set consisted of 5,000 documents. Team A's production and the original production only shared 16.3% of the total 'responsive' documents. Team B and the original production had a 15.8% overlap. Team A and Team B only had 28.1% of their relevant documents in common.

In the same article, the authors cite the results of a study by the researcher Ellen Voorhees of three teams of human document assessors on a set of more than 13,000 documents.

Id. at 13. Each team's results only corresponded by between 40-50%.

Good evidence to show that manual document review cannot be relied upon to locate all of the relevant documents in a data set.

NAS Devices

While small businesses may most often rely on cloud-based servers, they may have a need to store large amounts of data locally. Businesses that often perform video editing will not be to tolerate cloud server upload and download speeds. Cloud storage can also become prohibitively expensive.

Network-attached storage (NAS) devices are available for around $500 that can hold up to 64 TB of data. They usually come with file management software. NAS devices may have RAID arrays (redundant array of independent disks) which allow for immediate access to data if one disk fails. RAID arrays should not be used for data back-ups because they are configured to synch updates made on one disk to the others automatically.