Posts Tagged ‘Whitehead’

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The Principles of File Recovery

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

Andrew Whitehead is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular tool for windows online backup — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/the-principles-of-file-recovery.html

Why File Recovery is Possible

File recovery is nearly always possible, if you spot the mistake and do something about it fast enough. Luckily, if you do mistakenly delete a file, the file has not been physically removed, the operating system just doesn’t know where it is anymore. This is easier to understand once you realize that there is more to storing a file on your hard drive than just finding space for the information and writing it there.

The operating system must also keep track of where it put the file, without this it would be unable to find it again. When a file gets deleted, this record is altered and the disk area containing the information is marked as free space. The information itself remains intact until some other information is written over it.

The effect is similar to rubbing out the name of a video tape – you know you can use that tape now, but the original film is still on there until you do it, and should you change your mind you can do your own ‘file recovery‘ by writing the name on the box again. Commercial file recovery programs do exactly the same trick with computer files.

File Recovery Programs

There is no shortage of file recovery software to help you out if you delete the wrong file. There are numerous commercial file recovery programs, DOS has its own ‘Undelete’ command, and Windows has the familiar Recycle Bin. Except for Recycle Bin, they all work on the same principle of searching the hard drive for files that have recently been marked for overwriting. More advanced ones will also tell you how much of the file is recoverable by checking how much has been written over.

The seemingly simple Recycle Bin has one advantage over any third party file recovery program: it doesn’t allow any overwriting of deleted files stored in there. This means that files from here are recovered in their entirety, and will function exactly as before once they are restored.

Obstacles to File Recovery

The biggest obstacle by far is time. The longer you wait, the higher the chance of a deleted file being written over, unless it is safely in the Recycle Bin. Once this has happened file recovery is still possible but it will take a lot more than a bit of commercial software to do it.

Operating systems are continuously creating files, every web page you visit does the same, and so does every application you open. With this in mind, the time to start your file recovery process is the instant that you realize you needed that file.

If you are extremely security conscious enough to be running encryption software this will also reduce your chances of file recovery, as the majority of file recovery programs need to read the file to know it is there. If the encryption utility doesn’t offer its own built-in undelete function then file recovery is going to be very difficult and very expensive.

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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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Home Data Backup in Windows XP

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

Andrew Whitehead is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the best online backup software — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/home-data-backup-in-windows-xp.html

Possible Problems with Windows XP Data Backup Facility

The data backup facility in Windows XP is developed by Veritas, and works reasonably well on a small scale. It is very basic and has next to nothing in terms of whistles and bells, which is the root of its potential drawbacks. It has no media spanning; the ability to copy the data backup file to more than one disk, or whatever your preferred media is. If you are copying only your data file this is probably not going to be a problem, if you want to copy the whole drive it may be.

A second problem is that XP data backups are not compatible with Windows 98. If this is a problem, because you have some old data backups for instance, there is a way around it – you buy the commercial version from Veritas.

Another problem that some may find is doing a complete backup on a PC with no floppy drive. As a complete backup includes creating a recovery disk, it will return an error if there is no drive to create it on.

Deciding What to Put into Your Data Backup

Deciding what files to put into your data backup will decide whether you can use the XP data backup. If you have the installation disks from all of your applications you can get away with backing up only your data files, almost all of which are stored by default in My Documents making life very simple. You might also want to backup the registry, and you should beware of applications that store their files in dedicated, non-My Documents folders. The ones to watch are anything that works on text or graphics files.

Using Windows XP Data Backup

You will find it by going through Start/Control Panel/Performance and Maintenance, and you will see ‘Backup your data’.

If this is your first time, a wizard will appear, giving you two options. The simplest to decide is wether you want to ‘Always Start in Wizard Mode’. The easy answer is yes, but if you feel confident uncheck it. The other option is ‘Advanced Mode’ that not surprisingly offers more options.

Following the Wizard by clicking next gives two options, backup or restore. Since we are doing a data backup the choice is obvious. You now get four options of what to back up, select ‘My Documents’ unless you have reason not to, and click next. The next screen asks where you want the backup to go; the default is the desktop. Go with this. If you select ‘Finish’ now you will get a default backup.

You will see an Advanced button here, clicking this allows you to choose which folders to copy, whether it is a normal, copy, differential, incremental, or daily backup with explanations of the differences, and the options for verifying – always select this! – and volume shadow copy that allows files in use to be copied. Next you get the option to append or replace existing files, and finally run now or later.

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How is a Hard Drive Recovery Done?

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Andrew Whitehead is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular Amazon S3 based online backup service — Back2zip. This article available at http://free-backup.info/how-is-a-hard-drive-recovery-done.html

How a Hard Drive Recovery is Done

When your hard drive is ruined, the obvious question to ask is, “how do you get my data back? ” Despite what data recovery businesses may tell you, it is not done by black magic nor is it anything approaching rocket science, it has more to do with having the right equipment, and enough knowledge to know what to do with it.

Logical Hard Drive Recovery

Generally speaking, the first thing a hard drive recovery business will do when they receive a hard drive is to evaluate it to determine what recovery method will be required.

If the drive failure is a software problem, they will perform a scan of the drive to try and repair the file system. In some cases a partition can be repaired, restoring the hard drive to its status prior to the drive failure. If this cannot be done, they will do a very low-level scan, searching every sector of the hard drive for files. Once they have located a lost file, it will be copied onto the media of your choice, this is usually a CD-ROM, a DVD-ROM, or ideally onto another hard drive.

This type of Logical hard drive recovery takes a great deal of time, particularly if the hard drive is close to physical failure. It is not unusual for scanning to take a whole day, and recovering any files that are found to take another.

Physical Hard Drive Recovery

If your hard drive is suffering from a physical failure, the recovery method is considerably more difficult. There are two discrete forms of physical failure; electronic and mechanical.

When recovering data after a physical failure, a major hurdle is getting the correct parts to get the drive going again. A problem with hard drives is that if you have, for example, a 60GB Maxtor Hard Drive you will need another, identical, 60GB Maxtor Hard Drive to salvage parts from.

If it is the printed circuit board that has failed on your hard drive an identical circuit board is required to retrieve the necessary circuit components for replacement, because in most case it is not possible to swap the damaged circuit with the new one. Repairs of this nature require good soldering skills and a thorough knowledge of electronics to be successful.

Hard Drive Recovery Environment

You will see “Class 100 Clean Room” in a lot of advertising by hard drive recovery professionals. A Class 100 Clean Room maintains an air purity of less than 100 airborne particles over 0.5 microns in diameter in each cubic foot of air. This is to protect the sensitive internal components of hard drives. Whenever a hard drive is being worked on, a minimum of Class100 clean room should be used.

Hard Drive Recovery Time

The time taken for a hard drive recovery is usually 5-10 working days for a physical recovery (though if components are not readily available it may take weeks! ), 2-4 for a logical problem. An express service is often available, at a high price.

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Brief Overview of Online Backup

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

Andrew Whitehead is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the best online backup tool — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/brief-overview-of-online-backup.html

Brief Overview of Online Backup

Online backup is possibly the most convenient form of backing up files, leaving you with few excuses not to do it. Losing your files is something that is going to happen to you one day, not something that might happen, and if you do not backup your data it will be a disaster. Files can be lost in many ways, most of which are beyond your control. The most common reasons for data loss are:

  1. 42% Mechanical Failure
  2. 34% Human Error
  3. 15% Software Failure
  4. 6% Viruses
  5. 3% Natural Disaster

How Online Backups Work

Instead of storing your backup files on magnetic or optical media, you send your data over the internet to another computer, and this other computer acts as a remote backup. When you lose a file, you connect to that remote computer to restore it.

In addition to the great advantage of ‘disaster proofing’ your business with a remote backup, online backup is also a very convenient way for businesses to store critical, high-value, information that they can then download from anywhere in the world. For people who travel, work from more than one location, or want to share files with colleagues, online backup is the ideal solution.

Varieties of Online Backup

Basically, there are two forms of online backup. In the first option, you download software provided by the online backup provider and install it on your PC. This done, you connect to the online backup provider’s server, select the files you want to back up, and transfer them over the internet. When the day arrives when you find you have lost everything, you simply connect and restore all your files back onto your computer.

If there is a lot of files that could take a long time to backup, or you have lost your internet connection, some services will send you your backups on your choice of media.

Option two is to use a web-based backup service. You do this from your browser window, and you can access all your stored files from any computer assuming it has an internet connection. Generally, web based online backups cannot back up quite as much as the first option, but they are more user friendly and make file sharing easier.

Advantages of Online Backup

It can cost you less to set up and run than other options.

There is no hardware to buy, maintain, or repair and no consumable media to manage.

Online backups can be made completely automatic, releasing time for more productive tasks.

Simple to manage, all that is required is to turn it on.

No need to arrange for storage of media, either onsite or offsite.

No worries about media degrading or becoming obsolete.

Some online data backup programs can offer features unavailable in media based backups, such as remote data access and synching.

All your backup files are available online, from anywhere in the world, at any time.

All your backup files are encrypted by your computer before sending, and stored in that format ensuring a very high level of security.

Your backup files can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

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