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Backup Solutions for the Busy Stay at Home Business Mom

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

Walter Stevens is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular Amazon S3 based tool for online remote backup — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/backup-solutions-for-the-busy-stay-at-home-business-mom.html

Backup and the Busy Stay at Home Business Mom

For any computer user backup is important, but for the busy stay at home business mom it can be vital. Business moms not only need to keep their family in order but also have a home business to run, and if they use a computer for their business it is vital that they have access to the files that are essential to the running of their business. Business moms have no time to waste with the loss of important data due to a computer crash or virus, and for them backup is of vital import. Fortunately there are many possible solutions to your backup needs.

Online Backup

One of the growing tools with the growth of the internet is that of online backup. Online backup allows you to store your files online in reserve apart from your computer in case the worst happens. Then, you will be able to download your files just as you saved them and restore your computer to normalcy with all of your files returned.

This is a very powerful backup method, and also has the bonus feature of allowing you to access your files from any computer in the world by downloading them onto whichever system you are currently using. With new features being added to online backup systems all the time, and with storage amounts and uploading ease increasing as well, online backup can be a powerful solution for all of your backup needs.

CD-Rs, DVD-Rs and Your Computer Backup

New technologies are being created all the time that can prove very powerful for your backup needs. CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are two of the most powerful backup tools invented yet. While it used to be that floppy disks used to be the most common tools for backup, they are quickly becoming obsolete. After all, why bother with a floppy disk that can hold just over a megabyte of data when you can use a CD-R or a DVD-R which can hold hundreds or thousands of times as much data all on a single disk?

It is not uncommon to walk into a computer store these days and not even see a single computer which even has a floppy disk drive on it.

CD-Rs have been a round for a while, and there are now even CD-RWs which allow you to write your disk more than once. One drawback to using a CD-R or a DVD-R is that once you have written information onto your disk, the disk is finished and nothing new can be added to it and nothing can be taken away. This is not true with CD-RWs or DVD-RWs, which can be theoretically rewritten as many times as you require.

While they have not yet advanced to the stage of manipulability that a format such as the floppy drive can boast, this is a great advancement and allows for the far greater storage space that a floppy drive can never hope to obtain. You will find that DVD-Rs and DVD burners are more expensive than their CD burner predecessors, but this price is falling all the time and in the future will come to overtake CD-ROMs, so it is a good investment to make if you are serious about your backup.

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Initial Steps in Hard Drive Recovery

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Andrew Whitehead is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular Amazon S3 based tool for online file backup — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/initial-steps-in-hard-drive-recovery.html

First Steps in Hard Drive Recovery

If you find that your hard drive is no longer functioning, remember that a hard drive recovery is nearly always possible, so there is no need for panic. Data loss is not unusual and in nearly all cases the data can be recovered. Only in severe severe cases involving platter damage, magnetic degradation, or over-write of a file will the data be practically unrecoverable, and even in these cases a hard drive recovery by MFM photography may be possible if the data is valuable enough to justify huge expense.

Having said that, there are steps you can take to minimize further data loss and greatly increase your chances of successful hard drive recovery

Initial Steps in Hard Drive Recovery after a ‘crash’

If you find that you are unable to boot to the operating system, and you can no longer see the hard drive in the BIOS, there is a strong possibility that your hard drive has crashed. In this case you should shut the whole system down immediately. If there is some physical problem with the hard drive, it will be made a lot worse if you run power through the hard drive attempting to reboot the system.

If the head stack inside your drive is damaged, trying to run it will cause additional damage to the surfaces of the platters in your hard drive, and this is where the data you are wanting to recover is stored.

Initial Steps in Hard Drive Recovery after Corruption

If you have accidentally reformatted your hard drive, or accidentally deleted a file or folder, once again you must not write any new information onto your drive. The files you have deleted are still intact somewhere on the drive. Deleting a file simply means removing the location tag for that file, allowing that area of the drive to be over-written. If you add any new data it is possible that it will over-write your lost data effectively losing it forever.

If you believe a partition has become corrupted on your hard drive, it is very important not to try and re-install your operating system or add any new data to the drive.

If you have accidentally deleted a partition, attempting to restore it by formatting the drive will not recover your data, it will only result in the addition of an empty partition.

If you experience a single file corruption, any attempt to create a new file with the same name will partially over-write the file, greatly decreasing your chances of a full recovery.

This is just a short selection of the more common reasons for losing data from your hard drive, and illustrates that some attempts made by you, or even an IT technician, to recover a file or drive could decrease the chances of subsequent professional recovery efforts, or even make a successful recovery impossible. If you have any doubts about what action to take, just ask yourself this question: “Am I prepared to lose that data? “.

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Computer Backup Made Easy

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Walter Stevens is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular Amazon S3 based tool for online remote backup — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/computer-backup-made-easy.html

What is Computer Backup?

Computer backup is the storing copies of your files on a medium other than your hard disk. The reason that we make computer backups is to protect against the event that something happens to damage our files so they are no longer usable. If we have backups of our files, then we can restore these files to our computer through our backups.

What is Involved in Computer Backup?

Computer backups can be made in very different formats. The traditional method of backing up computer files was the floppy disk. However, floppy disks are becoming increasingly obsolete. It is already not uncommon to not even see a new computer that includes a floppy disk drive when you go to the computer store, and it is becoming almost impossible to actually get a new computer that includes such a drive. Floppy disks can only hold 1.4 megabytes of data, and there are formats which can hold much more.

CD-Rs are CD-ROMs that you can actually write onto, and hold up to 800 megabytes of storage. You can also use CD-RWs, which can be written onto more than once, unlike a CD-R. DVD burners are also becoming increasingly common, and a typical DVD-R can hold up to 4700 megabytes, or 4.7 gigabytes.

Another new technology which is becoming common for computer backup is the key drive. These are removable drives which are very small, the size of a key chain, and many in fact are designed to operate as key chains. They can hold up to gigabytes worth of data, not as much as a typical DVD-R but still a sizeable amount of data.

You can also make backups of your files online. Online backup involves putting your computer files onto an online server, which you can access from any computer that is connected to the internet. This allows you to not have to bother with physical media such as key drives or CD-ROMs while still backing up your data in a secure location.

What is the Best Form of Computer Backup For Me?

Only you can decide which form of computer backup is best for you. CD-Rs and DVD-Rs both hold a lot of data, but they have the drawback of only being usable once. Even CD-RWs and DVD-RWs, which can be rewritten, are not as manipulable as the old floppy disks. Although you can rewrite the CD or DVD, you must still complete the rewrite all at once. You cannot simply take a file from the CD-RW, modify it then re-save it onto the CD-RW, you must rewrite all of the data on the entire disk. This can be a great drawback to using them for your storage use.

A key drive does not have such limitations. While they are not as large as a DVD-ROM, they are still sizable, and you can work on them just as you would any drive on your computer. This makes them very powerful for your computer backup needs.

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Backup Your Files on the Internet

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Walter Stevens is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular Amazon S3 based tool for online remote backup — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/backup-your-files-on-the-internet.html

What is Internet Backup?

Backup is an important element of any computer user’s computing experience, and internet backup is an exciting new part of this activity. Traditionally backup involved the use of physical media such as floppy disks, CD-Rs or ZIP disks. However, it is now possible to backup your data through the internet without ever having to touch a disk. This is a very exciting and powerful form of backup that can make your backup process go much easier and smoother.

Never Have to Find a Disk Again With Internet Backup

When you backup your files through the internet, you never have to bother with finding a disk which holds your data on it again. Your data is always right there on the internet, ready to be accessed whenever you desire. You can access your data from any computer in the world with an internet connection.

When you backup your files on the internet, you are storing them on an online server which is separate from your computer. It works essentially as an internet drive which you can always reach through the internet. All you need to do is go to the internet address where your online drive is found, log in with your username and password and you can access all of the files that you have backed up through the internet.

Because of the fact that it is on the internet, you have almost unlimited possibilities with your backup storage. While physical media such as floppy disks or CD-ROMs are limited in how much they can store, an internet backup drive is essentially unlimited in how much data it can hold, as it can be powered by a number of servers each of which can hold great amounts of data. If you have a lot of data to backup, this can be an excellent resource for you.

How Can I Get an Internet Backup Drive?

In order to get your own internet backup drive, you will need to purchase storage services from some company, such as X-Drive found at www.x-drive.com. There are many different internet backup services available online, and they are not difficult to find. Simply type in internet backup into an internet search engine and you will find a myriad of results.

Depending upon which company you work with, and how large of an online drive you want for your storage will determine the price. X-Drive, the company mentioned above, offers a 5 GB online storage drive which costs only 10 dollars a month. They even offer a free 15 day trial, so you can try out their service and make sure that it fits your online backup needs.

Once you have found the company you think is best for you, all you must do is register with their web site, and be given or choose a username and password. Then, wherever you are, you can log onto their web site and access all of the online files that you need. This is a very powerful form of backup.

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Using the Undelete Command in Windows 98/95, DOS

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

James Fohl is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular Amazon S3 based software for online data backup — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/using-the-undelete-command-in-windows-98-95-dos.html

Using the Undelete Command in Windows 98/95, DOS

Early Windows users, as well as DOS users have a really great undelete tool built in to their systems. A lot of computer users are still running Windows 98, or below. While Windows XP has been on the market for more than three years now, some people have been hard pressed to make the upgrade, while others have found themselves completely happy with their Windows 98 setup.

Undelete is not available on Windows XP systems; only DOS and Windows 95-ME.

A really cool program that was in previous versions of Windows, as well as certain versions of MS-DOS is not available in Windows XP. The tool, Undelete is a DOS command prompt program that allows users to literally undelete the files that they had previously deleted.

The major limitation of the software is the fact that is can only recover files if no new files or changes have been made. So, basically the undelete command will allow you to recover files if you accidentally delete them, but it will not be able to recover files that you deleted a week ago.

Users should be experienced, as the undelete utility does not have a graphical user interface, and relies on text commands.

Undelete isn’t a flashy program. There are no graphics, and the program is not very user friendly. To start the program, you’ll need to activate a DOS prompt in your Windows operating system.

To do this, click the start button and select “Run”. Type in “command” and press enter. A black box with white text will soon be visible. This is the DOS prompt, and you will soon be able to use ‘Undelete‘ to undelete your files.

In order to use Undelete properly, you will have to learn the options for the program. As mentioned before, Undelete is a text based program, and does not have any spectacular user interface.

Undelete offers the user several different options to help recover your deleted files.

To gain access to the commands of Undelete, type in “Undelete /? ” at the DOS prompt, and press the enter key. The following text will be displayed on your screen;

/all – Automatically recovers all of the files you specify.

/list – All available files are listed (but files are not recovered).

/DOS Restricts recovery to those files that meet the file specifications (filespec) in the disk directory table.

/DT – Restricts recovery to those files found in the Delete Tracking File.

/DS – Restricts recovery to those files found in the SENTRY directory.

/load – Loads the Undelete memory-resident program into memory using information defined in the UNDELETE.INI file.

/unload – Unloads the memory-resident portion of the Undelete program from memory, turning off the capability to restore deleted files.

/purged[d] – Deletes the contents of the SENTRY directory.

/status – Displays the type of delete protection in effect for each drive.

/S[d] – Enables the Delete Sentry level of protection and loads the memory-resident portion of the UNDELETE program.

/Tdrive[-entries] – Enables the Delete Tracker level of protection and loads the memory-resident portion of the UNDELETE program. The optional entries parameter specifies the maximum number of entries in the deletion-tracking file (PCTRACKR.DEL). It must be a value in the range 1 through 999 with the default value determined by the type of disk being tracked.

After you have read through ‘Undelete’ program options, you will need to goto the specific directory of where you wish to undelete the files. Below is an example;

C:\> cd Downloads <- cd “change directory”

C:\Downloads\>

Once you are in the appropriate directory, rerun the ‘Undelete’ program, only this time fill in the correct options. For example, if you wanted to restore all files in the directory, you would use the ‘/all’ command. Below is an example;

C:\Downloads> undelete /all

The above command will allow the undelete software to safely recover your deleted files.

Now that you have an understanding of how the undelete software works on your operating system, the next time you find yourself worried about deleted files you can simply remember what you learned about the undelete command.

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