Data Data everywhere even when you think its gone
The biggest problem I have faced in IT over the last decade has been loss of
data.
I have had the problem at work where servers have crashed and lost data, more
often than not due to failure of disks. I have also personally felt the pain in
a hard disk losing its partition information, and frequently my wife's laptop
dying and windows not being able to boot.
Whilst many businesses have been aware of the criticality of data for a
while, data is becoming more critical to everyone. Many people don’t have
address books anymore, and if they do, do they contain mobiles, IM addresses,
email address etc. If you lose data the inconvenience and the pain is often
great.
What always surprises me is,
1.
The ease in which you can recover data
2.
The inability of IT departments to do so
The most regular issue I have had is laptop hard drives becoming corrupt.
This happened to my wife on a regular basis, at which point the IT departments
said, “nothing we can do love, you’ve lost everything”. You take their word the
first time. On the second occurrence I said thats tosh. Went off and bought a
2.5” USB hard drive chassis (£15) popped the drive in, ran chkdsk and heh presto
it all worked a treat. I’ve done this a few times for friends as well. So simply
put if you laptop dies (doesn’t boot up) and you have another PC, go and buy a
USB hard drive case, pop your laptops hard drive in (remember where all the
screws go) and run chkdsk.
When I lost my partition (with all my wedding photos on it) I hunted for a
product that would read the disk. I tried a few, but many didn’t cut it, they
all have a slightly different feature set. I happened upon Stellar and their
product Phoenix http://www.stellarinfo.com/disk-recovery.htm
I downloaded and had my data recovered in a few hours. Very simple and only for
£50
My latest data issue wasn’t that recent. I had some photos done and was given
them on a CD. At the time I tried to read them and couldn’t, I thought it was
because the CD wasn’t finalised so my CD writer software finalised it. In
hindsight I realise the issue was that the CD had been written on a Mac and not
a PC and so used HFS and not FAT or NTFS. At eh time I scoured the web trying to
find a means of reading the CD and none worked. Today I came across the CD again
and did another hunt. This time I found ISOBuster (http://www.smart-projects.net/cdrecovery.php)
I downloaded the free version and was pleasantly surprised that it could read
the CD including the HFS session and whats more I could extract the files, for
free. On looking ISOBuster does a huge amount more, and I would strongly
recommend the product.
The morale of the story is that the data is always there, and it’s not too
difficult or expensive to recover.
Remember even if you think your data no longer exists on your machine you are
probably wrong. The standard way of removing data is to completely rewrite the
disk. From my limited knowledge 7 times is the best compromise between time and
security.
So if you are ever going to give your PC away, make sure you don’t give you
hard disk. Of get it professionally cleaned.
-