Wow that sounds seriously tedious, but it actually makes a lot of sense. The investigations are all geared toward results in the courtroom, and the last thing you need is the defense making the case you tampered with the evidence, which they probably will claim anyway.
The serialization process sounds a lot like what they do with shared data on the cloud now. Any time a file is accessed, saved, or deleted, a record is recorded in an index, and backups are often saved (and either kept or deleted based on the service). So if it’s done using software, it wouldn’t be so bad, but if you had to manually enter every change to data into a record, yikes.
Thanks. It was very interesting but confusing to someone like me without that level of knowledge.