Data Recovery Blog

NY Times:

Creating perfect duplicates of his data allowed my cousin the peace of mind to know that even in a catastrophic failure, he could turn to the mirrored drive or critical files on it and be back to work in minutes.

Ever-increasing quantities of private and family data are kept on home computers. But until the last two years, there was a gap between the ever larger hard-disk drives that came with home computers and affordable methods to archive the gigabytes of documents, e-mail messages, home movies and MP3's. That gap has closed as consumer backup software has added features to write archives directly to external hard drives and higher-capacity DVD burners.

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Posted by Dane on July 22, 2005 | 0 Comments

Apple: "You can easily back up and restore Safari bookmarks, Address Book contacts, iCal calendars, and Keychains, as well as Mail accounts, rules, and Smart Mailboxes with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger."

Posted by Dane on May 27, 2005 | 0 Comments

Ask Metafilter: "I'm a pc guy, but my friend's imac hard-drive has crashed. I managed to salvage the entire drive on a dvd, but otherwise it's been rendered inoperable. So, my question: can I just copy the appropriate folders (keeping directory structure) from the dvd to the new (essentially empty) drive and have everything work as before? Can I do this for specific software, such as outlook (all saved emails lost!) or word? Or do I have to to a manual re-install of all software, export of emails, etc., as any self-respecting pc would require. Mac OS 9.22."

Posted by Dane on May 09, 2005 | 0 Comments

Symantec:

To back up the entire registry

1. Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup.
2. Click Advanced Mode.
3. Do one of the following:
   • If you see the Backup or Restore Wizard as shown below, make sure that "Always start in wizard mode" is not checked, and then click Advanced Mode.
   • If you see the Backup Utility window as shown below, go on to step 4.
4. On the Welcome tab, click the Backup Wizard (Advanced) button.
5. Click Next.
6. Select Only back up the System State data, and click Next.
7. Click the Browse button.
8. If the Insert Disk warning message displays, click Cancel.
9. In the left pane, click the Desktop button.
10. Click Save.
11. Click Next.
12. Click Finish.
13. When you see the message "The backup is complete" -- this could take a few minutes--click Close.
14. Close the Backup Utility window.

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Posted by Dane on May 04, 2005 | 0 Comments

Processor: "Imagine that you just purchased a brand-new server a few months ago and you are running a mission-critical database application on it when one of the hard drives fails. Before you worry about having the hard drive replaced, your primary concern is recovering your critical data. So, you hire a professional data recovery company to extract your data from the crashed drive. When you try to return the hard drive to have it replaced under your warranty, though, the vendor tells you that the warranty is void because the hard drive has been opened. It is a bit of a catch-22: Recovering your vital data is essential, but violating the hardware warranty is not advisable. How can you recover your data without violating the warranty on your hardware?"

Posted by Dane on April 30, 2005 | 0 Comments

About.com:

The first step in developing a solid disaster recovery plan is to develop an idea of what constitutes an acceptable loss for your organization. First, consider the impact of losing data stored in your database. Would you be able to recover from the loss of an hour's worth of data? If you're managing a human resources database, chances are that you could deal with this situation by instructing your personnel to reenter data entered during that period. If you're running the database supporting a financial institution, the loss of an hour's data could bring the instant wrath of clients and industry regulators along with significant monetary losses. Protection against these types of losses is provided by backups of the database and use of transaction logging. We'll discuss these in further detail.

Second, consider the loss of access to the database itself. What would be the ultimate result if your end users were not able to access information for an extended period of time. The loss of access to our human resources database would likely result in frustration, but minimal loss to the business. On the other hand, if doctors at a hospital were unable to access test results and laboratory findings in a timely manner it could result in the loss of life or limb. If you find that these issues are a concern in your organization, you may want to consider the use of failover clustering to ensure the continuous availability of your database. This concept will be discussed in a future article.

Once you've determined the level of acceptable loss for your organization and received buy-in from the users you support and your management, it's time to begin developing a strategy to minimize the impact of a catastrophic event on your database. Our first step is to develop a comprehensive backup strategy. We'll discuss this in the next section of this article. Read on!

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Posted by Dane on April 29, 2005 | 0 Comments

MacOSXHints:

The Unix program dd is a disk copying util that you can use at the command line in order to make a disk image. It makes a bit-by-bit copy of the drive it's copying, caring nothing about filesystem type, files, or anything else. It's a great way to workaround the need for Norton Ghost.

Normally, in order to make a disk image, the disk you're copying from has to be able to spin up and talk -- in other words, it's OK to make a copy if the disk is healthy. But what happens when your disk is becoming a doorstop? As long as it continues to spin, even with physical damage on the drive, dd and Mac OS X will get you out of the fire.

We had a situation recently where a friend sent a disk to us that had hard physical errors on it. It would boot in Windows, but then it would hit one of these scratch marks and just die. We fired up dd, and it started OK, but stopped at the same physical error location -- complaining about a Hard Error.

So the workaround was to designate the dd mode as noerror -- which just slides over the hard stops, and to add the mode sync, which fills the image with nulls at that point. We did it on BSD Unix, but as long as you can get the hard drive attached to your Mac, the command is the same:

dd bs=512 if=/dev/rXX# of=/some_dir/foo.dmg conv=noerror,sync

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Posted by Dane on April 25, 2005 | 0 Comments

PRNewswire:

First Advantage Corporation, a leading risk mitigation and business solutions provider, today announced the acquisition of Data Recovery Services, Inc., a national provider of business and consumer data recovery services, headquartered in Dallas. The addition of this new business line complements First Advantage's computer forensics operations by adding additional court-certified forensic experts, clean rooms and advanced engineering expertise to the company's existing data collection capabilities.

Founded in 1998, Data Recovery Services (DRS) recovers lost data from crashed, corrupted or damaged digital storage media or operating systems. With facilities in McLean, Va., Houston, and Dallas, DRS engineers use proprietary and customized diagnostic and recovery software and mobile clean rooms to facilitate the recoveries. DRS also offers computer forensics services and expert testimony to complement First Advantage CoreFacts group's national forensic practice. When combined, the group will service attorneys from a majority of the nation's largest law firms and many Fortune 500 companies.

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Posted by Dane on April 23, 2005 | 0 Comments

AdRants: "While it's about five minutes longer than it needs to be, this video, created in January to promote LiveVault disk data back up, thankfully, features John Cleese who can make anything amusing. In the video, Cleese, taking on the persona of Institute for Backup Trauma Director Dr. Harold Twain Weck (ha, ha, get it?), explains why disk back up is better than tape back up. Particularly humorous is when Cleese goes off on the IT staff explaining that while it might be difficult explaining the need for dick back up to IT types whose offices are festooned with Dilbert comics and stacks of Diet Pepsi cans as if they were the latest Martha Stewart home decor, Cleese's Institute for Backup Trauma has the solution.""

Posted by Dane on April 21, 2005 | 0 Comments

Michael Ridley:

Much has been made in various blogs (syndicateONE, Jason Powell, Data Recovery Blog) about this being Microsoft’s foray into the enterprise backup space. I suppose there is some truth to that, although Windows has bundled a rudimentary backup product of one sort or another for quite some time. The reality is that this product does not compete directly with tape backup systems. They solve different problems.

A disk-based online backup system allows quick recovery time for files stored online, can be an easier proposition to present an end-user client for "administrator-less restores", and takes disk I/O load off the main fileservers when you do dump to tape (since the tape dump is performed on the mirrored backup copy, not the live fileserver). Disk-based systems do not address the issues of off-site storage for disaster recovery or long term archival (despite what vendors such as NetApp might want you to believe, you cannot just keep buying more and more disks forever).

Posted by Dane on April 20, 2005 | 0 Comments

eWeek:

Microsoft Corp. and Veritas Software Corp. appear headed for a showdown as they vie to woo smaller backup and recovery customers with self-service file recovery capabilities and integrated backup and replication technologies.

According to Veritas officials at Storage Networking World here last week, the Mountain View, Calif., company next quarter will introduce an offering that marries its backup and replication technologies to enable users to recover data from their desktop at any time.

The disclosure comes on the heels of Microsoft's announcement last week that its Microsoft System Center DPM (Data Protection Manager) disk-based backup product has moved to public beta. The product is set for release in the second half of this year, said Rakesh Narasimhan, general manager of the Enterprise Storage Division for the Redmond, Wash., company.

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Posted by Dane on April 19, 2005 | 0 Comments

Ask Mefi:

I have True Image 8 and Norton Ghost 9.... They both do fine job in cloning hard drives.. but I can not trust incremental backup and images... I tried about a half dozen time trying to restore files using both software.. absolutely NONE of them was successful... damaged images, files... etc.. I already lost serveral pictures and data... So.. I am looking for file to file backup type software that can incrementally copy files/folders to another networked computer's harddrive without compressing or imaging.... This way... I can always have two exact copies all the time...

It's still too early for a consensus, but SyncBackSE from 2BrightSparks seems to fit the bill. It offers:

• Copy locked and/or open files
• A completely new FTP engine
• 'Fast Backup' option

Posted by Dane on April 18, 2005 | 0 Comments

PC Review:

One of the most important points for any computer user to remember is to always back up your data. As much as personal computing has advanced over the past 20 years, hard drives still fail. Hard Drives are an amazing piece of mechanical engineering, as then spin (sometimes continuously) at around 120 times per second (7200 rpm). These spinning platters are spinning at such high speeds that a small interference whilst in usage can damage the disk in a certain area. There are now fail safe mechanisms in place to prevent critical failures when there is a small amount of physical damage done to the drive, but accidents do happen.

When some areas of the disk fail, the hard drive is effectively useless. Cases like this usually require specialists to come and recover any data that might be left. If you have made routine backups of your important data, this would be a great inconvenience to restore and install all the applications and data once more, but still recoverable. If you were unfortunate enough not have any backups (or not recent ones), then you are in trouble. Data Recovery is a very time consuming process, and often quite expensive. Fortunately, there are some data recovery procedures that you can try before having to resort to professionals.

Posted by Dane on April 17, 2005 | 0 Comments

Lockergnome: "Here are PC World's favorite, free back-up programs - so now there's no excuse for not creating a safe copy of your data!"

• SyncBack v3.2.4 - Back up your files and sync them to another drive or directory.
• EZBack-it-up v2.0.1 - Lose all your excuses for not backing up your data - use this fast, easy-to-use program.
• Back It Up! v5.4.9.125 - Protect your data by creating compressed archives of your selected folders.
• Cobian Backup v6.1.1.264 - Offload routine download chores without compromising your data's specific needs.
• Back4Win - Protect your precious data with frequent backups.

Posted by Dane on April 16, 2005 | 0 Comments

Matthew Phillips describes how to setup a system for automatically backing up a Mac (OS X 10.2 or later) to an external drive using the freely available rsync.

Posted by Dane on April 15, 2005 | 0 Comments

Amazon:

The Unix file system is reliable and very well-suited to mission-critical applications in which maximum uptime is key. But it's not flawless, and that's where Unix Backup & Recovery comes in. This book details dozens of strategies for keeping Unix systems online. The strategies range from good administration practices that minimize problems to hot-restore techniques that allow you to recover from breaks as seamlessly as possible. The book also contains absolutely inclusive archive techniques that allow you to restore huge databases and file systems from backup media.

Unix Backup & Recovery includes a lot of general "recommended practices" advice and lots of scary stories about lost files (and more than a few about heroic system administrators who saved the day, or at least the data). But it gets down to brass tacks too, documenting lots of backup and recovery tools that can make the administrator's job much easier when they're used properly (including cpio, tar, and AMANDA). Coverage of specific systems' backup and recovery issues (including those of Solaris, HP-UX, Oracle, Sybase, and Informix) are invaluable, as is the coverage of techniques for extracting information from ancient, obsolete backup media. The point: read this book before you have a disaster, so you can do everything required to head one off and be ready to deal with problems when they happen.

Posted by Dane on April 14, 2005 | 0 Comments

Information Week:

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled the public beta of its upcoming Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager application, which is aimed at integrating disk-to-disk and near-continual data protection into its server platforms.

The application, known as Data Protection Server when it went into private beta in September, is Microsoft's first entry into disk-based backup and recovery, said Microsoft general manager Rakesh Narasimhan.

DPM cuts the amount of time required for data backups by backing up changes to the data instead of the entire data set, said Narasimhan. It discovers servers through Active Directory, and watches for changes to the data. DPM also allows data snapshots to be taken in order to maintain point-in-time copies.

With customers wanting to backup as much data as possible, anything to speed up the process is welcome news, Knieriemen said. "If someone can provide an application to do this efficiently, customers will be happy," he said.

The biggest question is how Microsoft handles the incremental backups compared to other vendors, said Knieriemen. For instance, he pointed particularly to Melville, NY-based FalconStor, which uses a process called "microscanning" to back data up at the bit-level rather than the block level in order to eliminate bits that contain no data and therefore speed up the backup process and cut space.

Posted by Dane on April 14, 2005 | 0 Comments

Amazon: "Detailing what can go wrong in backup and recovery and how this applies to the various backup methods available, this book couples that information with recovery and business continuity tactics played out over the backdrop of various real-world scenarios. Covered is how freezes, corruption, and loss affects documents, equipment, and day-to-day business activities, and the cost of downtime and job re-creation is explained in a way that builds the best budget for availability, backup, and recovery. Protection and restoration of user data and from various locations and times is also covered, as well as how to keep a business running after a power failure, network failure, or other unforeseen event."

Posted by Dane on April 14, 2005 | 0 Comments

Present Perfect:

Whenever you have a hard drive problem, TURN OFF THE MACHINE or REMOVE THE DRIVE. Put the disk in a safe place and don�t touch it for the first day while you collect your thoughts. It's very easy to break a drive beyond repair. Resist the urge to open it.

The worst thing you can do after a crash is to panic. Adrenaline can make you do stupid things: like pressing CONTROL-ALT-DELETE when a RAID disk array is rebuilding.

Posted by Dane on January 26, 2005 | 0 Comments

BIOS: "Winternals Software has released Administrator's Pak 5.0, the latest upgrade to the company's suite of repair, recovery, and diagnostics tools. Designed for Windows networks, Administrator's Pak is an alternate solution to re-imaging or reinstalling the operating system and applications on unbootable Windows servers or workstations. The sofware allows you to repair unbootable or locked-out systems, restore lost data, remove malware from infected systems while the machine is safely offline, diagnose system and network issues, and solve other problems. The new version promises significant upgrades to ERD Commander and Remote Recover, and a new centralised navigator that should help guide you through the repair process."

Posted by Dane on January 25, 2005 | 0 Comments

Reuters: "SunGard Data Systems Inc. on Monday said it would spin off its data recovery business, sending its stock up 11 percent to a four-month high. "

Posted by Dane on October 20, 2004 | 0 Comments

Boston.com:

Data storage company EMC Corp. of Hopkinton acquired Dantz Development Corp. of Walnut Creek, Calif., the latest move by EMC to strengthen its presence in small and midsize markets.

Dantz makes data backup and recovery software for consumers and small businesses. Its Retrospect software is sold in many retail stores and is included with external hard drives made by Maxtor Corp.

The acquisition marks EMC's first foray into retail software and gives EMC a low-end storage software product to match its hardware. After a brutal sales slump at the turn of the century, EMC recouped by cutting prices on its entire hardware line and by developing new products for smaller companies.

Posted by Dane on October 12, 2004 | 0 Comments

Hibiscus writing on Google Answers:

I think your best bet is to get a copy of Norton Ghost 2003. Ghost has proven itself to be a fantastic tool time and time again, and the new version is particularly well suited to what you want to do because it now has a Windows interface that doesn't require you to boot the system from a boot disk in order to make backups (though you would still need to use the boot disk to restore a drive image). It has USB support so you can make an image of your drive on to the USB drive you have attached to your system, but it also has full support for network imaging, so if you have a network with multiple machines you could make images on to the drive of another machine. If you aren't backing up huge amounts of data, Ghost also allows you to make images straight to CD or DVD. It allows you to use file compression, so if you have 100GB drives to backup but your external drive isn't quite so large you should still be alright. The new version also supports USB connection to another computer, and supports USB 2.0 to local devices.

Posted by Dane on October 07, 2004 | 0 Comments

Tech Republic: "Time may heal all wounds, but corrupted Microsoft Exchange databases require time, a mirrored server, and a persistent network administrator. That's what we found out when we revisited Peter, an Exchange administrator who recently suffered through a power outage and multiple system failures that crashed his Exchange server and corrupted his databases. Peter�s travails are documented in the article Corrupted Exchange databases play havoc with admin."

Posted by Dane on October 07, 2004 | 0 Comments

Amazon: "If you are an IT person in charge of starting the process, this is an excellent primer that points out all the other areas you have to consider. Hiatt outlines in 100 pages all the elements of research, planning, implementation, and maintenance. She reveals who should be involved in the process and what type of people should maintain the accuracy and currency of the plan. She even gives criteria on how to choose your team. Hiatt references many times throughout the manual when/how/if to use an outside consultant and off-site storage facilities. The following 150+ pages of vendor listings, charts and appendices are extremely helpful. She doesn't just write about planning, but gives you the checklists, plans, and questionnaires to help you get started. It will be much easier for me to use some of her lists and customize for our needs instead of having to write it all from scratch. Plus, she gives a thorough objective listing of vendors which saves me from searching the Internet. As Hiatt recommends, I will continue to research but, her primer will be my main reference. I can now get started without buying expensive software."

Posted by Dane on October 07, 2004 | 0 Comments