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Member of Reverse Engineering Group, a writer of various articles on Data Recovery & Storage Techniques
January 5, 2008
A method of data storage that has become increasingly popular is the use of external hard drives. Home computer users today have more data than ever, and many find that the storage capacity of
their computer’s hard drive is not sufficient. As the usage of external hard drives increases, there is
also a rise in the number of external hard drive failures. Listed below are various physical problems
that cause external hard drive failure:
Accidentally Dropped the External Hard Drive
There have been many cases where the external drive has been accidentally dropped by the user.
Many of these hard drives are designed to sit upright on a flat surface. This can cause the drive to
be susceptible to tipping over. The easiest way to prevent this from happening is to allow the external hard drive to lay flat instead of upright. This can prevent tipping. Otherwise, you should place the drive in a safe location away from the edges of a surface.
Twisted Electrical Cords and Cables
Many times, twisted cords and cables can cause an external hard drive to be pulled off a surface onto the floor. It is always important to make sure cords and cables are not twisted and are a sufficient length to reach from the computer to an electrical outlet.
Using the Wrong Power Cord
If you have several different power cords in the vicinity of your external hard drive, it is important to make sure you are using the correct power cord with your hard drive. There have been many instances where a user has plugged a different power cord into their external hard drive causing a power surge which will overheat the hard drive.
Power Surges from Lightning Strikes
It is important to always power down and unplug your external hard drive during a lightning storm. A power surge from lightning strikes can cause external hard drive failure by overheating the hard drive.
Contact a Data Recovery Company If You Have Experienced External Hard Drive Failure
If the data on the hard drive is worth preserving, you can contact a data recovery company to recover the data. A data recovery lab can repair or replace the damaged internal parts of the hard disk and retrieve any existing data.
External hard drives are a popular method of data storage. By following the tips above, you can protect your external hard drive and ensure that your data remains safe.
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This article can be freely published on a website however it must not be modified in any way including the author bylines, and the hyperlink must be made active as shown below.
Andrea Stone is employed with ReWave Hard Drive Recovery, a worldwide data recovery company. Visit the ReWave Hard Drive Recovery website for more information about external hard drive failure and data recovery.
November 28, 2007
You must have always come across the phrase ?Data Backup? when you talk about data loss. It?s not that we don?t understand its importance completely but just that we pay little less attention to it than required. Each day, we hear about several data loss incidences seeking data recovery software or data recovery services options. If you feel that your data is valuable, then why not keep it safe? Why not have a Backup strategy?
A concrete backup strategy is important to any recovery plan. The following are the main elements to a solid backup strategy:
Define what type of data needs to be backed up.
You create a variety of documents, customer databases, financial records, or employee records. Hence, by defining the order of importance of data, you should decide on what to backup.
Decide the Backup Media
You must know the storage media for backup. You may consider backup data to be stored from a computer to a rewritable CD or DVD, a network server, a USB key, or a ZIP disk.
Define the time limit you have available for backup.
You must know of the product that is reliable enough to perform the backup at the scheduled time. If you are a traveler and usually connect to the network remotely, then you must know of a backup strategy that covers your information accurately.
Decide the level of access to the information.
You must know the security requirements and concerns, and that your backup software ensures 100% data accuracy while restoring. You must also ensure that your backup software prevents unauthorized access to the information, through a password or a variety of encryption algorithms.
Define the schedule of backups
You must set the schedule of backups i.e. the frequency of backups needs to be determined. You must ensure that all the workstations (from where you need to backup the data) are ?On? at the time of performing backups. For remote workers, you must develop standard operating procedures.
Define the backup policies
You must decide when to perform a full system backup or incremental system backup. It is recommended to store the backed up data offsite i.e. you can keep your data in two different locations away from each other.
Work on the ease to backup the data
What if you have successfully performed the data backup but it takes time while restoring it? You must work on the set up where you can backup the data with one command. Agreed that it will take little more time and work but will be very useful when the system crashes.
Perform daily backups
You must ensure that there is less time between the two subsequent backups otherwise if there is longer period between backups, you may lose quite a lot of data.
If you do not understand the way to implement a backup strategy, you might have to check with the local expert.
Stellar a data recovery Software & service company provides range of data recovery software & data protection software. Stellar has recently launched a data backup software i.e. Stellar InstaBackup is very useful software for backing up and protecting valuable data. This software simplifies the process of data backup and is a powerful solution for both business and personal needs. It can also be used both in a networking environment and on a single machine. Although the software is easy to use, a number of advanced options such as Full / Incremental backups, strong File Encryption, and Zip Compression are also available. The software has a simple graphical user interface, requires no prior knowledge of data backup, and is a comprehensive data protection solution for all Windows File Systems.
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Hard Drive Data Recovery Software
October 30, 2007
Hard Drives store most important data of a computer, including the system files. At times, due to various reasons, the drives fail. This causes serious issues as one may loose all the data on disk. A hard drive crash may cause terrible financial losses as well.
There are various methods to recover the data from a hard drive. The most common method is using the data recovery software. These can be used to recover the data from hard drives. Most of the software is simply read only and nondestructive.
This type of software usually begins by detecting the hard drive, analyzing and assessing the damage. Then they try to correct it and retrieve as much data as possible.
These software solutions are a bundle of utilities which help users in recovering data lost from a hard disk, like an accidental format, partition loss software malfunction, file or directory deletion or sabotage.
There is data recovery software available for as low as $300 to $500. They are available on Internet freely and can be downloaded after paying using a credit card, in most cases. The data recovery utilities that are available for $30-$50 are nothing but rip offs and will only harm your hard drive instead of recovering and data for you.
The choice of data recovery software depends on the operating system used. If one is using windows or Linux, the same utility may not work on both. In fact for Linux, separate utilities are available.
There are lots of data recovery companies that have customized utilities to retrieve data from the corrupted drives or deleted data. All these offer specialized services for recovering the data from various hard drives. Some may need a person to ship the drive to their labs. Yet some other companies also offer remote recovery process. The hard drive data recovery processes differ from drive to drive and from problem to problem.
Before sending a hard drive to any lab for data recovery, one must decide whether the costs justify the real value of data. Hard drive data recovery process, in labs, involves identification of damage to disk, causes of damage and then the best approach for recovery. At times, it?s possible that entire data set may not be recovered.
Common hard drives from which data can be recovered are:
? Standard IDE Hard Drives
? SCSI Disk Drives
? Portable Drives
? Removable Storage Devices
? Hotswap Drives
? Micro Drives
? Multi Disk Raid Arrays
? Pocket Drives
? External ATA & SATA Drives
Most common drive failures are:
? Hard drive clicking or making noises
? Hard disk head crash
? Primary hard disk error or not found error
? Invalid or corrupt FAT table
? Accidental file or folder deletion
? Non system disk error
? Computer unable to access hard drive
? Corrupt or damaged master boot record (MBR failure)
? Lost or deleted office documents, spreadsheets, emails, presentations
? Virus damage & password recovery
? Blue screen of death
The best possible solution to hard disk data damage is to back all data regularly. Other then that, there is almost no method, which can provide complete protection, against hard drive disk failure.
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Jeffrey Meier of Jam727 Enterprises at http://www.Jam727.com offers these detailed tips into Hard Drive Recovery at http://www.jam727.com/HardDriveRecovery/harddriverecovery/index.html
August 8, 2007
Many computer users have experienced it, and unfortunately it can arrive at any time whether your computer is new or old. The dreaded ‘Drive not formatted. Do you want to format now?’ error message. It can happen quickly and without warning leaving many users wondering what to do.
The data on the hard drive still exists, but a wrong response to this error message can damage or delete the existing data.
The ‘Drive not formatted. Do you want to format now?’ error message generally indicates a corrupted partition, deleted partition or damaged partition. This can occur for many different reasons including a computer virus, power surge, software installation or software that partitions the hard drive.
If you receive this type of error message, it is important that you act carefully to keep your important data intact. It is important that you: 1) do NOT say ‘yes’ to format the drive; 2) do NOT attempt to repartition the hard drive; and 3) do NOT attempt any ‘do it yourself’ data recovery techniques.
A successful data recovery depends on how you respond to the ‘Drive not formatted’ error message.
In most cases, a data recovery company can recover data from a system displaying this error message.
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This article can be freely published on a website however it must not be modified in any way including the author bylines, and the hyperlink must be made active as shown below.
Andrea Stone is employed with ReWave Hard Drive Recovery, a data recovery company serving clients in cities worldwide including Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Durham, Greensboro, Houston, Jacksonville, Little Rock, Los Angeles, Memphis, Miami, Nashville, New Orleans, New York City, Orlando, Phoenix, Raleigh, Richmond, San Antonio, San Diego, Tampa, Virginia Beach, and Winston-Salem. Visit the ReWave Hard Drive Recovery website for more information about data recovery.
August 3, 2007
Many years ago I developed a strategy for building a customers’ home PC in a way that helps avoid future technical support problems and increases customer satisfaction. Part of that strategy is partitioning the hard drive in a way that can prevent data loss when Windows crashes. By creating multiple partitions, the operating system can be installed on it’s own primary partition, allowing user created data to be saved on another partition. When the operating system crashes or becomes corrupt, data saved to logical drive partitions are not affected. If needed, the primary partition containing the operating system can be formatted or the OS reinstalled without the loss of saved data.
Drawbacks to the multiple partition strategy:
As we all know, the Windows operating system automatically saves files to the C: drive, leaving the user with the responsibility of making sure their files are saved on a separate partition. Let’s face facts. Unless a file is saved to the Windows Desktop folder the average user will not be able to find it. The Windows default path for a users documents and settings can be changed to another drive partition but that does not cure the problem since user installed programs save to the C: drive by default. In reality, the multiple partition strategy only works with advanced users who are not too lazy to save their work in a safe place.
What is an advanced user?
Until recently my idea of an advanced Windows user was a user who had a great deal of knowledge about the inner workings of computer hardware and software. To become more in line with the PC industry definition of an ?Advanced User? I have redefined my definition of an advanced user. An advanced user can be determined by answering one simple question; Does the user understand the file system? A Windows user is advanced if she/he can save a file to a specific folder and then find that file with Windows Explorer. Finding a file with the application that created it does not count.
The multiple partition strategy works great for advanced users and gives technicians some peace of mind. Average users on the other hand, require other more hands on alternatives such as backup scheduling. Unless a technician wants to visit a customer on a regular basis to do periodic maintenance an auto backup schedule should be implemented. It is not wise to leave the data backup task in the hands of an average user for many reasons.
Creating a Strategy:
To create your own strategy take into consideration how the PC will be used and the skill level of the intended users and the hardware available. Try to set up automatic backups using Windows Task Manager or 3rd party backup software if users are average or new to computers. You might also consider a CD or DVD backup strategy. An online backup service is a good choice for users with a broadband internet connection. No matter what strategy you use, make backups as easy and simple as possible. The more hands free your backup strategy is, the more likely you will avoid data loss.
We are often reminded about the importance of backing up our data and I am not immune to procrastination. To stress the importance of making backups, keep this in mind. Your hard disk will fail, sooner or later, are you ready?
( For more information about custom PC building strategy see…
http://bytepowered.org/build_computer_plan_1.php)
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Lyle Cochran is a PC Technician and owner of Cheap Computer Solutions - Guides, Tutorials and Articles all written in easy to understand language. Learn how to make your old PC run the newest software and games or make Windows behave the way you want. http://bytepowered.org
Authors, Submit your Computer, Internet and Communications Articles for viral marketing and get them translated in to 8 different languages. http://bytepowered.org/articles
July 30, 2007
There is an old saying, ?If it ain?t broke don?t fix it?, many people subscribe to this philosophy with their computers. If they can turn their computer on and access their email or play a game, then preparing for an eventual disaster is usually the last thing on their minds.
If you use your computer for business or store important files like family pictures or tax records, it is imperative that you formulate a plan to backup your computer on a regular basis. Even if your computer is brand new, or just a few months old, hard drives can fail, power surges and lightening strikes happen, and viruses or malware can wipe out your data at a moment?s notice.
Recently, the main hard drive failed in one of the computers I manage for a busy Real Estate office. They had a backup plan in place, but they failed to routinely follow it. The latest backup data on the external drive was over a year old. They lost hundreds of contacts and thousands of dollars in labor spent building data bases and specialized software files.
I restored all the old data I could and immediately instituted a regular backup schedule that they have been following religiously. They were not worried about a catastrophic data failure because they had installed new hard drives in their computers just over a year ago. But hard rives are very delicate and complex, and one never knows when there may be a failure.
So how do you go about setting up and following a proper computer backup plan? Here are my suggestions:
1. Get Some Form of External Storage Capability. Windows XP has a built in restore feature, but that is worthless if you have a catastrophic hard drive failure. To be truly effective, your computer backups must be stored outside of your computer. You can do this by writing the data to CDROMS or DVDs, but this is a rather slow and cumbersome method. There are online services which allow you to store your data on their secure servers, but the upload times can be really slow, even with broad band.
I recommend getting a large capacity external hard drive, preferably with USB 2 or FireWire capability. Buy the largest capacity drive you can afford, a minimum of 120 Gigabytes. Now if your main hard drive fails, you will have a current mirror image of the drive you can restore using a special boot disk created by your backup software.
2. Buy a Computer Backup Program and Use it. There are a lot of software solutions out there, Norton Ghost is probably the most well known. For various reasons I won?t get into in this article, I don?t recommend Ghost as your primary backup software. I have tried many different backup programs and the one I use most frequently is Arconis True Image. Regardless of what program you choose, learn to use it effectively, develop a computer backup plan and stick to it.
You may want to backup once a week, every other day or even daily if you are constantly adding new and important data. I perform an incremental backup of each computer every five days. This gives us recent enough data files to work off of should we experience another failure. Whatever schedule you choose, stick to it, no excuses.
3. Create a boot disk and know how to use it. The most recent backup in the world is useless if you are unable to restore it. If your hard drive fails, you must be able to restore your backup data to your new drive or computer. To do this you will need a bootable CD or a set of bootable floppy disks to restore your backup image. Each program does this a bit differently, be sure to read the manual and fully understand the process.
By following the Best Practices I listed above, your data will be safe from eventual loss. Hard drive failure will no longer be a major catastrophe, if you have a proper backup plan in place you can be up and running in a matter of hours.
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Article by Mr. Shannon Baker, over 20 years persuading computers to do his bidding. http://www.fix-my-slow-computer.com
March 13, 2007
This was a question that was recently put by forward on a TV consumer show. One guy had his hard disk crashed and lost all data. He was able to get his hard disk replaced because of a warranty.
To retrieve the data he had it sent to a data recovery company to get it recovered. The price tag was about $ 1500. But, he also wanted to have that extra cost covered by the same warranty.
I’m not a lawyer, but I believe it is quite clear that any warranty from any hard disk manufacturer doesn’t include restoration of data. That said, with the long life time and high durability of today’s hard disks they could very well afford this when it is caused by a hard disk failure.
As long as the hard disk only have a mechanical or electronic fault and it have not been exposed to water or fire the track record for restoring the data by a professional data recovery company is quite good. However, you have to expect to pay a chunk of money to have it restored. And you can never be 100 % sure they will succeed.
It’s always worthwhile to backup all your data or at least backup the data that is most important for you. This is the best warranty against data loss.
If you use the computer for leisure, playing games or surfing the Internet you may not need to take any backup at all. But today, more and more people store important document and information on their computers. Some store data vital to their professional life. This can be years of work such as academic thesis or it can be the content for a new book they are writing. Most people store at least some important information such as address books, emails, text documents, family pictures, music or company records.
Should you take backup? If so, what type of backup is best for you?
This all depends on: The value of the data if it becomes lost. The time it will take to recreate lost data. The cost to make the backup.
In most cases the data you need to backup are limited to specific files or folders. If that is the case you don’t need to backup the complete hard drive and the cost to make backup is reduced. If you only need to backup documents, emails and address books then there are many cheaper alternatives including USB flash memory keys, online backup or backup to CD’s/DVD’s.
If you install important software from Internet then you need to take a full backup of the hard disk at least once. This is because nearly all software programs store system related information in what is called the reg keys deep in the operating system which must be backed up on a full backup.
As an alternative, make sure that you save the installation files and any accompanied software registration keys in one specific folder after you have downloaded the software. If you do this and include the folder in one of your regular smaller backup, then you are capable to recreate it.
If you get a hard disk crash and you want to minimize the downtime and you don’t want the hassle to install the operating system and all the software’s you have on installation CD’s. If that is the case then you should consider making a disk image backup.
This is a backup of the complete disk drive. Included in the disk image software is a boot utility. From it you can create boot diskettes or boot CD’s.
Thus, if you hard disk crashes you first install a new hard disk. Next you boot up from your diskette or CD. From the boot program you are then able to create your disk image directly on the new hard disk. So by doing this type of restoration you don’t have to install the operating system and all you other programs from any installation CD’s. This saves you time.
Copyright © 2006 Per Strandberg
Per Strandberg manage an information site on data backup storage technologies!
Guide over providers of data recovery services. Get information on how to restore crashed hard
drives!
March 3, 2007
Virtualization is a process that allows one piece of hardware to run a number of operating system images all at the same time. Prior to its inception, the standard for x86 servers was to only run one application to one server. This was fine until more and more servers were needed to meet the growing demands of the IT world, as data center managers were spending millions of dollars on wasted server space.
But now, virtualization has changed everything, for one machine can run a multitude of applications, each isolated into one virtual operating system, completely separated from the others.
As a subsidiary of EMC, VMware popped onto the technology scene in 1998, beginning as a start-up company and soaring to become one of the driving forces in virtualization in just a few short years. In 2005, virtualization technology came in to mainstream awareness faster than anyone could have ever imagined - including many IT experts. Not only did it fly right on through the developmental software stages, it fell headlong into the data center… all within a year.
Recent times have seen the IT world look for different means of consolidating that would assist in running their systems more efficiently. Virtualization software from companies such as Platespin was just in time to initiate and capitalize on the momentum for this new technology, seeing nothing short of outstanding adoption rates and customer satisfaction. The latest estimates even show that nearly 75% of all companies with at least 500 employees are installing virtual servers, with nearly half of those who are already utilizing the technology stating that of all new servers purchased, close to half of them will be virtualized.
Other companies besides Platespin have entered the virtualization market as well. Microsoft has had quite a bit of luck creating and marketing its own virtualization software, mostly due to their large customer base. Xen is another, with its software currently breaking into the market. Of course, just like anything else, software is certain to have a kink or two as it passes from a magazine headline to the adoption process, so buyers would do well to go with a trusted name when purchasing a solution
So what’s next for virtualization?
Many of the experts claim that management of this in-demand technology is right around the corner, as current users aren’t mixing and matching technologies, but are simply utilizing them for one purpose- either networking, storage, or systems. If your concerns are related to storage, you would work with storage virtualization. Ideally, all virtualizations of one company would be able to be pooled and be tied together or moved around as needed. As with any new technology, the question of automation has been popping up throughout the conversations of vendors and customers. Is it possible? Yes, it is. Will it happen? I predict it will…
Jennifer Hanson recommends you visit http://www.platespin.com/ for more information on virtualization.
March 2, 2007
Data loss is a bitter reality. Individuals and almost all types of businesses are confronting with it. You never know when it’s your turn of being a witness of a severe data loss. It is observed that there are a number of causes of losing your important data. Some of these causes are irresistible like floods, earth quakes etc but others can be avoided by implementing appropriate measures of how to prevent data loss.
The human side of data loss is very critical and needs to be addressed adequately. A research in 2000 revealed that 15% of all major data loss incidents took place due to human errors only and they were either caused by not implementing the right backup procedures or having no backup at all.
In many cases the problem starts when the users start out-of-box solutions that may not fit their organization’s requirements. Even at large corporations, senior IT persons don’t really assess their business or technology needs and this is one of the reasons of their downfall in case of data loss because when they don’t know the actual needs, they are unaware of taking proper remedies for their problem.
Human intervention in early stages of data loss can make data recovery process more complicated rather just impossible in some cases. Sometimes, the unknown experimentation of humans to recovery data by re-booting the system again and again and even worst of this happens when they try different recovery utilities to retrieve their data.
Taking regular backup of your data is the common practice to recover data in case of disaster but the sluggish behavior on manager’s part some times lead to catastrophic circumstances. There is a chance that some are unaware of the proper data backup techniques even the type of media that they use to write their important data files on.
When disaster strikes any business or individual, the normal human reaction is panic. Because the loss of data signifies serious penalty, even the top management start taking inappropriate actions. Wrong buttons get pushed and the situation gets even worst. Sometimes the urge to correct the system in no time can cause serious and irrecoverable situation. IT specialists often are not equipped to deal with crisis or data recovery techniques.
A business’ success or its failure is highly dependent on the excellence of a professional data recovery company. Users should only take those measures which ensure that the probability of a data loss is minimized not increased.
It is vital to consider that the disaster is embedded in a blend of mechanical failure of media/device and human error, so, too, the retrieval or recovery solution lies in a creative combination of humans and technology. The underlying philosophy of successful data recovery is that technology is something which should be used by optimal use of human brain and knowledge i.e. humans should drive the technology, technology shouldn’t drive humans.
M usman Qureshi
Software Engineer and webmaster at http://www.vibranttechsolutions.com
email: usman@vibranttechsolutions.com
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