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What's
new
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DROID 6 has many new features which improve the speed, accuracy and your exploration of its
results. Behind the scenes, it introduces some new capabilities to allow signatures for
new file formats to be developed more easily, and with greater power to match
difficult file formats.
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A new binary signature recognition engine is approximately twice as fast as the old
engine, and with an enhanced syntax offering new
kinds of signatures.
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An option to limit how much of a file is
scanned from its beginning and end.
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New profiles are quicker to start up, using copies of pre-built empty databases, rather
than creating them anew each time.
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Profiling tools
were used to locate and eliminate bottlenecks. In
particular, binary signature recognition and archival file handling is now much faster.
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A new reporting engine offers 11 predefined reports, giving statistical breakdowns of your files and
folders in various different ways.
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Reports can be viewed on screen, and saved into several different file formats, including
PDF, text, web pages and XML.
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CSV files can now export results one row per file, or
one row per format identification.
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Filters can now be saved and loaded for quick access to commonly used filters.
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Icons are used to communicate essential information quickly.
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Filtering can be turned on or off from the main
toolbar, via the Filter On checkbox.
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Folders and archival files which are filtered out in the main view appear greyed out, to
distinguish them from items which were not filtered out.
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If a file has multiple identifications, its format information is now directly accessible
from the main window.
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"Open Containing Folder" option to go straight to the files you have profiled from within
DROID.
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A right-click popup menu offers common editing options quickly.
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Copy to clipboard for results in the main window.
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"Expand" and "Expand next three levels" options for selected results in the main window.
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General tidying up to maximise the use of screen space.
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Container signatures are a new kind of file format signature, to recognise file formats
which contain other files inside themselves (for example, Microsoft Office 2007 files).
The syntax of the signatures used by the binary signature engine has been enhanced, both in
terms of readability and fundamental expressivity. In addition to existing syntax, it allows
for text strings, case insensitive text strings and arbitrary sets of bytes. These
features can be mixed together in ways which the previous engine cannot process.
This makes it easier to create new signatures, and to understand existing ones.
In some cases, several old signatures can be combined into one signature, which
increases the speed of DROID.
The new syntax will be documented in other technical documentation, and will not appear in
signature files for some time until users of DROID have updated to the newer engine.
Some of the new syntax can be seen in the container signature files, which do not have
backward compatibility issues.