How Many Documents in a Gigabyte? An Updated Answer to that Vexing Question
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For this round, we collected over 10 million native files (“documents” or “docs”) from 44 different cases. The sites themselves were not chosen for any particular reason, although we looked for a minimum of 10,000 native files on each. We also chose not to use several larger sites where clients used text files as substitutes for the original natives.
Our focus for the study was on standard office files, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDFs and email. These are generally the focus of most review and discovery efforts and seem most important to our inquiry. I will discuss several other file types a bit later in this report.
I should also note that the files used in our study had already been processed and were loaded into Catalyst Insight, our discovery repository. Thus, they had been de-NISTed, de-duped (or not depending on client requests), culled, reduced, etc. My point was not to exclude any particular part of the document population. Rather, those kinds of files don’t often make it past processing and are typically not included in a review.
That said, here is a summary of what we found when we focused on the office and standard email files.
Tags: native files, standard office files, Vexing Question
