A file extension, also known as a file ending or a name extension, is the letter or combination of letters that follow the period in a full file title. The file extension assists a computer system, such as Windows and macOS, in determining which software on the system is connected with the file. File extensions frequently, but not always, reflect the file format, or file type, of the item. The extension of any document can be changed, but this does not transform the file to another form or alter anything about the document other than this component of its name.
A file header may be used to identify many different sorts of files. A file header is a signature placed at the start of a file that tells the computer system and other applications what to do with the information that precedes it. The file header will be used by many electronic discovery programs to validate file kinds. The prevalent concern is that if a custodian modifies a file’s suffix or the file is not titled using a software’s normal naming scheme, the file would be lost throughout the digital finding process. File headers are particularly significant during a computer forensic investigation because they allow individuals to identify the information of lost files, user activity records, registry keys, and other pertinent evidence.
The difference between these aspects is that the file header is the internal part of how the file is perceived by the device, and the file extension is an external indicator for the user that leads to the file header. For investigations, the file header will be more profitable and reliable as it stores more information that can be useful.
PNG, which stands for Portable Network Graphics, is spelled either as the symbols P-N-G or like the word ping. It is a lossless picture format with bitmapped images. One of the finest features of the PNG format is that it allows for translucent pictures, which is useful in many situations (Hadi, 2016). A website designer, for instance, may wish to include a logo on their webpage that does not obscure the backdrop. Visibility is especially handy for adding images to a web page that must function in both light and dark modes.
JPEG, which stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, is a digital picture compressing standard that is widely used on the Internet and in digital photography. To obtain greater compressing, the JPEG standard employs a lossy sacrifice. In the file extension used by IBM-compatible computers, JPEG is also shortened as JPG; a JPEG image is depicted in the photo.
MOV is a well-known video file type created by Apple. It was created to work with the QuickTime application. MOV files include video, sound, captions, timecodes, and other sorts of material. It is suitable with both Mac and Windows versions of QuickTimePlayer. MOV files require much more system memory on a system since they are very elevated, making the whole process.
AVI (Audio Video Interleave) is compatible with almost all web browsers on Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs. AVI, which was created by Microsoft, provides the greatest clarity but also has big file volumes. It is enabled by YouTube and functions great for watching television. The most prevalent video file type is MP4. Apple’s recommended codec, MP4, is also compatible with the majority of other gadgets. It stores video, audio, and text files using the MPEG-4 encoding process; however, it has a lesser resolution than some others. MP4 is a good format for movies shared on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
A file system saves and arranges data on some media, often one or more hard disks, in order for them to be quickly accessed. The majority of file systems in use today store files in a tree form. There is only one root node at the top of the tree. There are files and folders under the root of the tree. Each domain can include files and subdomains, which can contain other items and directory structure, and so on, possibly indefinitely.
A file path is a precise description of where a file is located on a disk. It is critical to document the exact file path of evidence or contraband file. This would be analogous to recording the location of a baggie of drugs at a crime scene. A file path specifies the precise location of a data source within the disk and folder in which it is stored. An investigation must establish the particular file path utilized to locate information on the machine. This is due to the fact that the file path provides the specific location of the file required, as well as how the file was discovered in the first instance.
Typically, file system entities are folders or files. These items are well-known to everyone. Some storage devices, however, enable the concept of symbolic links. A symlink or a weak link is another name for a symbolic link. A symbolical hyperlink is a particular file that acts as a pointer to another file. Symbolic links are mostly transparent to programs, and their activities are immediately forwarded to the link’s destination. The file or location to which the link is pointing is referred to as the link’s target. When a symbolic link is destroyed or changed, just the link itself is removed or changed its name, not the destination of the link.
In practice, most storage devices make extensive use of symbol connections. A poorly established symbolic link might sometimes result in a circular connection. When the target of a link links back to the originating connection, this is referred to as a circular reference. It is possible that the cyclic connection is oblique: location points to directory b, which points to folder c, which has a subfolder linking back to domain a. When software is recursively walking directories, circular connections can cause disaster. This case, though, has been considered and will not cause your application to cycle indefinitely.
File systems define naming rules, such as the highest number of letters in a name, which symbols can be used, and, in certain platforms, the length of the correct file extension. File types are not the specific instance in many file systems (Olivier, 2016). Including the file itself, standard file store metadata that contains details such as the file’s size, properties, placement, and precedence in the directories. Metadata may also indicate unoccupied chunks of usable capacity on a disk and the amount of space accessible.
In theory, properties are the parameters of a computer object. For instance, users could right-click points mentioned to reveal their characteristics. Font size, font type, and text color are examples of font or text attribute: file location, file size, file creation date, file modified date, and file access date. The timestamp associated with modification is important because it can prove that an investigator did not tamper with or otherwise modify any data files (Yuan, 2020). Accessed timestamps merely reflect when the file was last viewed without any changes being made to it.
References
Hadi, A. (2016). Reviewing and evaluating existing file carving techniques for jpeg files. In the 2016 Cybersecurity and Cyberforensics Conference (CCC). IEEE. 55-59.
Olivier, P., Boukhobza, J., Senn, E., & Ouarnoughi, H. (2016). A methodology for estimating performance and power consumption of embedded flash file systems. ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS), 15(4), 1-25.
Yuan, J., Aoki, T., & Guo, X. (2020). Comprehensive robustness evaluation of file systems with model checking. In 2020 IEEE 20th International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS). IEEE. 99-110.