Dealing with failed hard disks, SSD drives and other storage media on a daily basis, it’s hard not to make a conclusion that, whatever storage media you’re using, it’s doomed. Why exactly are hard disks unreliable, what causes SSD drives to fail, and what can you do to minimize the chance you’ll ever need our services? Read along to find out!
While software-based recovery is pretty much the only method available to ordinary computer users, this method has an awful lot of assumptions. It needs your hard drive to be working and in a reasonably healthy condition, both mechanically and electronically. Your computer’s BIOS must recognize the hard drive, at very least exposing it to low-level functions of the OS. Finally, the OS must be able to read the drive, at least in low-level mode.
Linux. Lots and lots of people are using one or more Linux devices without realizing it. Android phones are running a variation of Linux, with their internal storage formatted in one of the Linux-supported file systems. Ubuntu is also a version of Linux. Many Web servers and nearly all NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices run an embedded version of Linux. Your home Wi-Fi router is probably Linux. Even your digital camera is most probably running embedded Linux! Chances are, your refrigerator and coffee maker will run Linux, sooner or later.
If you like experimenting with non-mainstream operating systems, you most probably know about the various file systems they use. With many alternative operating systems being able to read media formatted with FAT (or, to be previse, FAT32), it is easy to forget that it does not normally work in the other direction. Install an alternative file system to a USB pen drive, and your Windows boot won’t be able to access that drive. More often than not, you’ll see a message prompting to format that USB drive into a Windows-recognizable file system. If you confirm, Windows will indeed reformat the flash drive, but everything you stored there with the other file system will be lost.
In this article, we’ll discuss the different approaches to recover files from disks with missing partitions, messed up partition tables and/or MBR record.
Today in our data recovery blog we’ll talk about something completely different. Let’s talk about how to irreversibly destroy information such that no one would be able to recover it later on no matter what tools they use.
Single-drive attached storage options such as personal clouds, USB 3.0 and SATA enclosures are becoming increasingly popular among home users and in small offices. WD, Buffalo, Shuttle, Synology, Qnap and many other manufacturers offer a wide range of sealed and removable-disk, single and multiple-bay solutions. Not all of these are created equal. Some solutions are inherently more feature-reach than others, and some models are more reliable than the rest of the crowd. However, even the most reliable storage will eventually fail or need replacement. In this article, we’ll have a look at what one can do to preserve (or recover) information stored in these systems.
Having a backup strategy is often cited as the best way to protect information against data loss. Today, we’ll look at a particular type of backups that use cloud storage to sync and back up your files.
