Posts Tagged ‘Windows 98’

The First File Recovery Website

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Amanda Wood is a contributor at Free-backup.info — the home of the popular tool for personal online backup — Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/the-first-file-recovery-website.html

Definition of File Recovery

To define the term file recovery, you’ll first need to know what a file is. A file is a collection of data or information that has a name, called the filename. Nearly all information stored in a computer must be in a file. Different types of files are data files, text files, program files, directory files, and so on. These different types of files all store different types of information. Data files store data, text files store text, program files store programs, and directory files store directories, and so on.

The File Recovery Website

File-Recovery Net is a website based on services to help consumers recover their lost data. Their company was founded in December of 2002. They offer services and programs to help assist in recovering data, whether it has been accidentally deleted or erased, or if the data is missing due to a virus or malfunctioning software over an Internet connection. File-Recovery Net prides themselves in being the first online file recovery service available anywhere.

Other available data recovery utilities require that the user purchase a license outright before they can use it. All these utilities work the same way, differing only in the user interface. Therefore File-Recovery Net’s company services are less expensive by far, then having to purchase a license for an application they’ll probably only use once.

Their programs can recover deleted files and folders on a user’s local drive, and even files from deleted or damaged partitions and drives not accessible by the operating system. Their services and programs operate in all Microsoft Windows environments from Windows 98 to Windows XP. With their intuitive Microsoft Explorer style interface, complete folder and file information is displayed for all drives, thus allowing drag and drop operation to help in the aid of file recovery.

How File Recovery Works

When emptying the Windows Recycle Bin, file recovery utilities take advantage of the fact that the actions are reversible. When files are deleted, they aren’t really deleted. The operating system changes the attribute of the space used by the file. The space of the file is considered in an “occupied” status until deleted. Once it is deleted the status changes from “occupied” to “available.” The file’s information is then hidden until it can be unlocked by a recovery utility.

File-Recovery’s programs include support for IDE, ATA, SCSI hard drives and floppy disks, FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, NTFS5 file systems, long file names and local language file names, including non-English. They also specialize in the recovery of compressed and fragmented files on NTFS, detection and recovery from deleted or damaged file partitions, exact file name or partial file name search, disk image restoring. Disk image restoring restores a backup file that represents an entire hard drive.

With the continual advances in operating systems, their web service utility will always be current with updates installed automatically. They also have a trial version of their program, Active@File Recovery, for free that you can obtain from their website.

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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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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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Backup to CD

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

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

The Importance of Keeping a Backup

If you have ever wondered about the importance of keeping a backup, imagine how you would feel if a virus destroyed the contents of your hard drive? Or a problem could only be solved by using a system recovery CD, wiping out all your data in the process? Or you run FDISK and accidentally remove a partition on the wrong drive? Or your hard drive dies, taking your data with it? Mistakes will always happen and all disc drives eventually expire. Without a backup it is a disaster, with a backup it is reduced to a very large nuisance.

Files That You Need to Backup

A private user only needs to back up files that they have created or modified themselves. Computers use both program and data files; programs can be reloaded from the original discs, but your data can only be reloaded from backup copies.

Making a backup is simpler if you store all your files in one place. Letting each program use its own default storage file results in you data being scattered all over your hard drive. If you are using Windows 98 or Me put everything into My Documents, in Windows 2000 and XP use Documents and Settings.

What is Needed to Make a Backup

There a choice of methods you can employ to make backup copies of your files. You can simply drag and drop the files you’ve created to a CD, copy them using the XCOPY command, use a third party CD mastering program to copy your files, or you can use Windows or a third party backup programs to create a backup to CD.

If you have software such as DirectCD drag-and-drop is extremely easy and you can use a CD-RW, but it is labor intensive if you have a lot of files, hard to keep organized, and you will need compatable software to read the disc.

Using the XCOPY command allows you to copy files from a specified folder made after a specified date, eg ‘XCOPY “\Documents and Settings”\*.* /s/d:03-15-02 K:\’ copies everything from Documents and Settings created after 03-15-04 to the specified drive.

A CD mastering program, such as Nero, allows you backup your files to a CD-R. While this takes more steps than drag-and-drop, the resulting disc can be read by almost any CD-ROM, CD-R, or CD-RW drive without installing a compatible UDF reader program first.

The disadvantage with these methods is that they are unable to create a backup larger than the media it is stored on. If this is a problem, you will need a true backup program capable of ‘media spanning’.

Backup programs differ from ordinary file saving by compressing files, storing many files in a single file proprietary to the backup program, and using the ‘Archive’ file attribute should you ask for a backup of changed or new files only. They often allow Backups to be stored as files for transfer to CD later, and a disk image to be made for disaster recovery.

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