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EnCase® Forensic Version 6 —
Why You Should Upgrade

The Version 6 interface is similar to Version 5 (click to enlarge)

Upgrade to EnCase® v6 to achieve significantly improved search capabilities and greater productivity. These new v6 features and additional features planned for future release were requested by our customers and will deliver more digital-investigation power. .

New Features

Case Indexer
EnCase® V6 introduces our new patent-pending, powerful indexing engine which indexes text extracted from the Stellent™ Outside In Technology. You can now build a complete index of words from multiple languages based on your evidence file and then create fast and easy queries using EnCase® Conditions and Filters. These indices can be chained together to find possible keywords in common with other investigations. The Unicode-supported index is built from the contents of personal documents, deleted files, file system artifacts, file slack, swap files, unallocated space, emails and web pages.

64-bit Support
EnCase® Forensic now comes in 32 bit and 64 bit. Common investigations are now involving hundreds of gigabytes to tens of terabytes of static data requiring analysis. The amount of this data easily exceeds the memory addresses in 32-bit software. In today's 32-bit desktop systems, there can be up to 4GB of RAM (provided the motherboard can handle that much RAM) which is split between the applications and the operating system. Users will note a performance increase, because a 64-bit CPU can handle more memory and larger files. One of the most attractive features of 64-bit processors is the amount of memory the system can support. 64-bit architecture will allow systems to address up to 1 terabyte (1000GB) of memory. The new 64-bit version of EnCase® Forensic v6 delivers improved multi-threading and a more efficient use of all available memory.

A multi-page Adobe® PDF displayed in the Doc panel (click to enlarge)

Native File Viewer
EnCase® Examiner v6 has incorporated the Stellent™ Outside In file-viewing technology and now displays over 400 file formats natively in the Doc panel.

Enhanced Email Support to Natively Parse
Guidance Software has added the following NEW email formats to EnCase® v6 and now natively presents their contents without their application:

• MS Exchange 2000/2003 EDBs
• Lotus Notes NSFs versions 5, 6, 6.5 and 7

Hard Disk Caching for Email Parsing
In v6, EnCase® Forensic now uses disk caching to quickly open large and complex compound files, such as Lotus Notes NSFs and Microsoft EDBs and PSTs.

Additional File System Support
Guidance Software has added the following NEW file systems to EnCase® v6 and now presents the folder/file structures:

• FreeBSD’s Fast File System 2 (FFS2)
• FreeBSD’s UFS2
• Novell NWFS
• Novell NSS

Although the NWFS file system has been used by Novell since NetWare version 2x, EnCase only currently supports NetWare versions 5.1, 6.0 and 6.5 with either the NWFS or NSS file system.

Support for Apple® DMG Files
The file extension, dmg, is for Macintosh® OS X Disk Copy disk image files. Treated like a real disk, these files can now be added to EnCase® Forensic, displaying the internal file/folder structure

Support for Apple / Unix Files Compressed with PAX
Files compressed in a Macintosh / Unix environment using the PAX (Portable Archive Exchange) command can be saved in either tar or cpio format. EnCase® Forensic v6 now includes support for the parsing of BOTH cpio and tar PAX compressed files.

Support for Gzip Compressed Archive Files
EnCase® Forensic v6 adds Gzip (zlib) support for regular (non-compressed) files. EnCase® software does NOT yet support bzip or adc formats.

Alternate Path
How may times have you set up your equipment to acquire a drive image, only to have run out of drive space? EnCase® Forensic v6 now allows you to set an alternate destination volume for evidence files at the start of the media acquisition.

Display of Hard Disk Serial Number
Are you tired of removing the suspect hard drive to document the serial number from the label? Hard disk acquisitions with EnCase® Forensic now read and document the true serial number and the volume serial number for the media. NOTE: Acquisitions made with versions 1–5 will NOT display this information.