Relativity Processing vs. Nuix Workstation – Update

Following up from my recent post on “Relativity Processing vs. Nuix Workstation” I wanted to provide an update on some of the Relativity processing functionality I discussed.

The post has been an unprecedented success and I want to thank all of you who have taken the time to read my post, I did not expect so many of you to read it and the positive feedback has been inspiring. The feedback I have received from both Nuix and Relativity has been equally positive and with that in mind it has sparked this post update.

Kyle Disterheft (Processing Team Lead @ Relativity) reached out to address a couple of the points I raised in the blog and I’m happy to share his updates by way of clarification.

Firstly, I wrote about the workflow steps that you need to go through before ingesting data, this followed the online documentation.  Kyle says you do not need to go through each of these steps in order before ingesting data, it is possible to move directly to “Creating a new processing set”, these are the reasons why:

• Creating custodians can be done on the fly when adding the data source.
  • Creating new Password Bank entries isn’t required for setup if there are no passwords
  • Processing Profiles can be built into the Relativity workspace template, and you can also create them on the fly.

Secondly, I wrote in my conclusion that I didn’t think Relativity Processing could become the best processing tool as there are not currently any plans to be able to process forensic images. I’d like to add now that Relativity Processing has the capability to open the forensic containers and process the user created files; but deleted files that exist on an E01 and Ex01 (disk) image file are skipped during processing, with the exception of recycle bin items, which are processed with limited metadata. Currently mobile forensic images are not supported.

There are several factors that I believe need to be enhanced before Relativity Processing can be held at the same level as Nuix Workstation. Firstly, being able to revisit a processed set of data and run new culling methods over it so releasing a new set of data from the data set into review would be a good start. Nuix Workstation is versatile and isn’t constrained to processing directly into one review platform and can therefore be used for multiple purposes, Relativity Processing can only be used to process into Relativity Review. If there was a break in Relativity Processing to push out to load file instead of into Review this could be useful.

Relativity Processing has come a long way in a short space of time, it is a very good work in progress. Nuix Workstation has been around for a long while now and is constantly improving, especially with the automation capabilities – through either Nuix Automation or Rampiva Automation you can really get value out of the workers. This is an interesting time in our industry and I am looking forward to seeing where the technology goes.