Time is always a critical factor in digital forensics investigations. Your stakeholders rely on you, and your team, for timely sharing of the insights that help them understand what really happened in an incident.
Portable Case allows non-technical stakeholders—such as investigators, HR teams, and attorneys—to easily review and collaborate on case data from digital devices. Features like Mobile View, tagging, commenting, and bookmarking make it simple to examine and work with the data.
To help you get those important insights to your stakeholders as quickly as possible, we have made some significant improvements to the speed of creating a Portable Case from Magnet Axiom and Axiom Cyber.
Significantly faster Portable Case exports
We are always working hard behind the scenes to make meaningful impacts to the products forensic labs rely on. With the release of Axiom and Axiom Cyber 9.5, we made some important adjustments to the processes used in Portable Case generation, leading to incredible speed improvements.
As with everything in your investigations, no two cases are the same. The size and makeup of each digital case is unique, so results will vary based on these factors. We tested a range of cases, both internally and externally with customers, and found the improvements averaged around ~70% faster. In cases that included a large volume of media, such as mobile devices, we saw the most significant improvements in the performance of Portable Case creation with results being as high as 94% and 96% faster!
| Case name | Percent decrease – Time |
| Test case 1 – 25k hits | 52% |
| Test case 2 – 227k hits | 82% |
| Test case 3 – 1 million hits | 32% |
| Test case 4 – 508k hits/53k media | 75% |
| Test case 5 – 640k hits/127k media | 65% |
| Test case 6 – 853k hits/176k media | 94% |
| Test case 7 – 569k hits/ 67k media | 96% |
We asked long-time Magnet user Chris Brennan of the Metro Nashville Police Department to test the speed of the new Portable Case creation on a case with both Axiom 9.4 and 9.5, and his feedback was exactly what we hoped for:
“I have to admit…I ran 9.5 twice because I didn’t believe the time…Whatever y’all did, it worked! Amazing speed now!”
— Det. Chris Brennan, Metro Nashville Police Department
How this speed increase benefits examiners
The increased speed of producing Portable Cases has the potential to change your workflow for the better, helping you get case data out to your stakeholders the same day instead of potentially running an export overnight. This added speed can also help you get more done with your Axiom licenses and forensic workstations, processing and examining additional devices or cases in the time saved creating an export.
The improved speed of creating a Portable Case also helps to minimize the impact of a power interruption, network outage, or other events that could interrupt an export. This helps you to avoid the incredibly frustrating experience of getting halfway through an export only to encounter an interruption that causes you to have to re-start the process, adding to the time needed to get critical evidence over to your stakeholders.
Get started with faster Portable Case exports
The only step required to take advantage of this drastically faster export, is updating to the latest version of Axiom (Axiom 9.5 or later). If you are interested in helping your team access and review evidence even faster, Magnet Review provides the ability to securely collaborate on digital investigations in real-time, from anywhere in the world. If you aren’t already using Portable Case with Magnet Axiom, this is the ideal time to check it out and to collaborate on data review by tagging, commenting and bookmarking data. For more information on the capabilities of Portable Case check out our blog Making a case (Portable Case) or Magnet’s free Portable Case training course.
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