Data Recovery
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What if your hard drive decides to enter the Elysian Fields in this very moment? Sure, you could simply get a new hard drive to substitute for the defective one with a quick run to your favorite hardware store. And with last night's backup you might even reconstruct your installation quickly. But what if you don't have a backup?
We have experienced the truth to be more like this: many users don't even have a backup, or it simply is too old and thus useless for recovering any useful files at all. In case of real hard drive damage, only a professional data recovery specialist can help you - say bye-bye to your vacation savings!
So with a few silly Friday polls, and most of us making our living with an electronic file cabinet at our fingertips ...
What's Worth Recovering?
In the business world, obviously much is worth recovering, or that you have to recover. If you don't have a backup, say because you had something in transit that died, like a laptop, what's worth recovering?
For me it would be my writings, though I try hard to be sure that I have a backup copy. If I write on the laptop, I usually grab the changed files and send them to a flash drive before shutting down. Those files are usually small enough that I can easily back them all up.
I've got a couple backups of my pictures from the house and I even periodically re-burn old DVD backups because those are precious moments that would be hard to replace. Would I pay a thousand dollars or more to recover them? I'm not sure. My wife and I would really have to think about it.
I guess I'm not sure if there's anything here at the Ranch that's worth recovering at the prices quoted for drive recovery.
And Happy Easter!
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Our home PC I backup IE Favs, email addresses, my pictures, my docs and a couple of other minor things to a flash drive once a month and put it in our fireproof safe.
Work PC, I backup IE Favs and a few docs I have that are not on a network share to a flash drive. Major docs are taken care of by company backup processes. I do copy my SQL Server admin stuff and all disaster recovery docs once in a while to a flash drive anyway.
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A data recovery tool I've used in the past that works really well is R-Studio (I'm not a salesman - check out their web site if you want details - http://www.data-recovery-software.net/). That reminds me - where are my burnable DVDs ...
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At work I typically just let the Enterprise backup software take care of me. All of my code, DR docs etc are all backed up on a regular basis along with my code repository etc.
At home, I have a gmail account. Any important documents get stored there, I have some code that would be somewhat hard to replace, but I have a thumb drive that I write most of that to when I'm working on something important.
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After being screwed one time on this... I now test my backups to make sure they can be restored. We had a guy come in and set up a backup system here, then I called him a few days later and asked him to restore a few files... they could not be restored. We implemented a new backup system the next day. Turns out our old hardware was hosed, so the backup wasn't even running. I have no confidence in that guy anymore, but I'm glad I checked up on him. Don't just check to see if you backups are being done... make sure they can be restored!
I was a little confused by the subject line this morning... I thought we'd gone Rasta or something. "Tracing Deadlocks" before coffee totally looked like something else
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Having just gone through this -the warranty replacement drive arrived Wednesday, I learned a few things.
The PC in question is shared by my kids, college kids for homework and stuff.
I was very surprised that they actually had been (listening to dad)
doing CD backups for most of their stuff but not quite all or not for some recent work.I tried a couple of recovery programs including some high end stuff. Some could not even see the drive. One could see them but the "home" version only allowed 5 files to be recovered during each session. A major problem for thousands of files and it cost too much.
I finally tried a shareware program I found on MajorGeeks and then bought it for $49. It did everything the high end program did but with no limitations and came licensed for 3 PC's. I was able to recover and back up the drive. I was unable to make it bootable even using Partition Commander and reformatting it several times hence the warranty replacement.
My long-term backup plan is stop burning CDs and use external USB drives and an imaging program that I currently use on my servers.
Set and forget but only after testing.
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Has anyone tried SpinRite? (http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm) I've heard wonderful things about it, but I don't own it myself. It does low-level disk access and multiple reads taking into account physical hardware characteristics to try very hard to get at the data even in unreliable sectors of the disk. It has a very good track record of being able to get a "dead" disk drive working again at least long enough to get the data off and replace the disk.
It might not work if your disk has been in a fire (then again, it might), but it's certainly worth looking at for the typical disk crash scenario.
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I tried it years ago in the floppy era and it worked a few times for me. Haven't messed with it since then.
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