Edinburgh Napier University

  Digital Forensics is a fast developing job market, as well as being topical and interesting, and as such is an area in which University students are keen to develop and study. At Edinburgh Napier University this topic has been taught with flexible and distance learning students in mind, and to promote accessibility the practical exercises have been formed around the use of cloud-based technologies. This approach has highlighted a key issue, in that cost-effective cloud-based resources struggle to provide adequate CPU and IO capabilities to drive large simultaneous student numbers when performing forensic exercises on disk images created using physical disk acquisition techniques obtained from real systems. This paper considers the issue, and proposes a simplistic and easily reconfigurable image creation technique specifically designed to support digital forensic practical sessions.