Yes correct, bestrecoverysoftware.com is offering free data recovery consultation.

Benefits

We will suggest the correct data recovery software or services company to handle your data recovery requirements.

You can send us an email and we will suggest the correct approach for recovering your lost data, let it be an accidental format of hard drive, simple deletion or complete physical crash of your hard drive.

Are you planning to buy Xbox 360, what is the first thing you are going to do? Most of the times we would go to the shop right away and buy the first Xbox 360 and may end up getting not the right deal. I think one should look online of where we can get a better deal and learn more about the product?

The quickest and fastest way would be to check out products at shopwiki. If you are a shopper like me this sharing is for you – we all know and heard about wiki already and today I stumble shopwiki. I thought, this is great to share because it is very enlightening and not just giving you the reason to buy it but also to wait of when is the right time to buy the product.

Why shopwiki?

ShopWiki has revolutionized online shopping since it stumbles on every store on the internet. Conventional shopping sites will only show you stores that have PAID for placement but ShopWiki will give a shopper everything, almost 30,000 stores instead of the usual 1,000 stores that other shopping sites have. For a shopper, this means they can find anything and everything for sale on the web at www.ShopWiki.co.uk. More products from more stores mean better deals and savings

I have been reading across various articles on data recovery over the internet and suddenly I came across one document, which had some funniest suggestions for recovering data from hard drive, which is experiencing physical crash. For people who do not know what physical crash means, check previous entries of my posts.

I will try to highlight some of the suggestions given in that document. The most interesting part of the document was that one of the data recovery companies has released it.

Table of contents had these topics

Freeze it, Drop it, Hit it

• Hold the drive upside down, making gravity change the head geometry ever so slightly. Vertical is also another option.
  
  
• Slightly rap the drive with your knuckle, (but nowhere near hard enough to damage the drive).
  
  
• Try the drive in another machine, (slight drive voltage change assumed the miracle worker here).
  
  
• Rap the drive just SLIGHTLY harder than you did above in 2.
  
  
• Freeze the hard drive in the freezer for two hours, and place in a plastic zip lock bag to prevent condensation from forming on the drive when you plug it back into the system, (head geometry, electrical resistance lowered, electrical contact points adjusted, etc., assumed the miracle here).
  
  
• After the drive warms up to room temperature or better, rap it even harder with your knuckle this time.
  
  
• Repeat all of above steps on next day, as sometimes I have gotten data off drive simply by trying again.

Well after the miraculous attempts suggested above I am sure the drive must have been died, most probably drive would not be having any mechanical or component failures. Freezing the drive might be a good idea, but the refrigerator in home is complete no no.

Warning: Please do not try and the steps explained above, if you have a drive that is experiencing physical problems, it is advisable that you should consult a professional data recovery companies such as Disk Doctor Labs Inc, Ontrack and drivesavers.

Yet another search engine, if you are looking for alternative search engine you may use Find.com. You must visit this simple yet powerful search engine and try it for a while for your web search requirements. I came across this new search engine last week while searching about alternative search engine. It is a fast and straightforward search engine. I like its clean layout, and it represents web 2.0 designs as well.

This search engine (Find.com) has an uncomplicated front page so you do not have to wait for hours just to do a simple search. After you type in your keywords to search, the results page is displayed in a different page. The results come with a nice layout and are highlighted with a blue color, the keyword on green and the content with black color. After you click the result, it is open in a new tab or window so you can try to open another search result without striking the back button unlike other search engines.

Find also have an expanding directory or category of hot articles ranging from electronic to Finance. This will be an added value for new search engine.

I must say that Find.com has possibilities to become big search engine and the most important thing, Find.com is growing.

If you are an individual looking to but that special power cord and are not able to locate the same on ebay or other shopping websites, try Americord.com. Americord is a specialist producer of computer power cords, heavy-duty power cords, extension cords, electronic power adapters, and portable lighting.

If you are a supplier, manufacturer or an OEM firm there is lot for you to choose and do bulk orders. The website caters to everyone who is in need of computer or general use cables, wires etc. This UL/CSA approved company accepts custom orders as well, if the components you are looking for is not listed, they can manufacture required components within 3-5 working days.

The americord.com website has online web store for you to purchase or orders items through internet. They always are running lot of discounted and clearance sale, where you can get lot of items in discounted cheap prices.

Apart from doing mass production for regularly used computer cords and power cables, Americord also features the capability for special orders. At their manufacturing plant, they can create new moulds and dies to make the perfect size, fit, and specifications for anything you need.

Americord is the right place to order special cables for your requirement. You can buy the products online. They also accept order though phone between Monday to Friday during business hours. All the stock items are shipped within 24 hours, the communication that includes order and shipping details from their support department is reliable.

You must have heard for this term with many data recovery applications, “RAW” recovery. What exactly it means? Instead of a direct explanation of this term, it is mandatory for us to understand how it is related to data recovery.

FAT or NTFS are the two file systems that are supported by Microsoft Windows, FAT file system is dependent on file allocation tables, whereas NTFS depends on Master file tables called MFT. MFT and FAT holds the allocation information for a file or a folder. There are various sorts of situations, which may damage these file and folder allocation information. If this information is lost, there is no information for any data recovery software to locate the file.

The loss of this critical information is dangerous and as most of the data recovery companies are scratching there head for various ways to get lost data recovered, this method of performing raw scan came into existence. This is method which is the backbone of all file recovery applications, photo or music recovery software.

Therefore, it is extremely clear that when file system is completely damaged so that it is not possible to get the allocation for files, which are stored on the drive and there is no way to identify them. RAW recovery is extremely beneficial and pulling such files out of hard drives. RAW recovery for me should not be dependent on any file system as it works on unique file signatures (every file has a unique ID or signature).

Well the other most important part of file recovery of raw scan is in depth knowledge of the file type, by putting the signatures of all file types and giving a tentative size to look for will not be always successful. This in depth knowledge of file helps in identifying correct file size. Thus, the best file recovery software is the one that is able to identify a file using a signature and knows various other ways to get the file size.

In the end, the only limitation with file recovery would be recovery of files without the actual file names before they were lost. However, getting the main content and some more rework in terms of renaming should not be a complain as much worth information has been restored.

Mobile phone is one of the best technological inventions of 21st century. Primitively mobile phones started with analog digital beeps and sounds and added various variations in them to create ring tones, similar to what we used to get in old times handy video games. Today the scenario has completely changed, now you can set various types of ring tones like true tone ring tones, polyphonic ring tones, music ring tones etc. A ring tone on mobile phone lets you know if a call has come, through the ring tone that you set. You can set any ring tone that give pleasure to you. If you have problems in finding the song you are searching for, I would like to recommend you a website.

Ring Tones Factory is a website, which offers an extensive assortment of ring tones. This website offers a large collection of free ring tones, wallpapers, graphics, and games for our mobile phone. There is no restriction on any of the cell phone providers. You will have your mobile stuffs downloaded to your cell phone in few seconds. The most prominent thing is that we need not to buy nor we need to have any third party application for this.

The website provides top 40 hottest ring tones in various categories to choose. The categories from which you can choose from are rock, jazz, Christian, classical, film, etc.

So, visit this website, register an account, and get your favorite ring tones as well as other mobile stuffs.

Most of us wonder what do the people in data recovery labs do to recover data from your drive. If you see data recovery as a process, it does not involve any planned actions, as it is always a reaction based on the cause for data loss.

Let us categorize it in two major categories

a) Physical Crash – where drive is not getting detected by the BIOS of your PC and the drive has either electronic, mechanical failure or some kind of damage such as accidentally dropping the drive, fire, flood or any other external cause.

Recovery from such cases involves an attempt from an experienced recovery professional to make drive working by any means. If drive has electronic failure, the engineer would try to look for similar electronic board in the inventory to make drive working. If the cause is mechanical which is mainly head making clicking sound, is broken or is jammed are repaired by opening it in a class 100 environment and it is not necessary that it has to be a clean room and it is impractical to have a clean room for such small device.

I have heard of many tricks people try to make drive working in such cases, for e.g. dropping drive from a small height on a soft surface to ease any jam. Freezing the drive if drive has quick heating problems, let me tell you these attempts are extremely dangerous and can make the drive permanently damaged.

Read more! »

RAID systems are considered the safest storage where data is stored in strips to improve performance and parity to regenerate lost data. HP (Compaq), DELL, IBM, delivers some of the most popular RAID servers etc. In recent years network storage has gained popularity such as NetApps, Snap Server, buffalo tech and many more. These NAS servers have inbuilt RAID storage and is accessible from a high-speed network to all its users assigned by the administrator of the storage.

Despite having the hardware protection, these servers comprising RAID devices do fail and data loss does happen. RAID recovery is not an easy job to perform, even if you know about some of the recovery tools available in the market. Taking the drives out from the failed RAID array and attaching them to another machine maintaining the same order would be difficult for novices.

Then approach the most difficult portion of RAID recovery, which is reconstructing the RAID. There could be various causes to a RAID failure.

• RAID reinitialized accidentally by the administrator causing a new array to be formed and losing old data and configuration.
  
  
• One of the drive has failed and RAID is not coming up
  
  
• Drives going offline suddenly and not being mounted due to power surge or mishandling.
  
  
• RAID card causing RAID to fail

The most important portion in RAID recovery (specifically RAID 5) is to identify correct parity order and stripe size, and also the block size (the size of a cluster formed when we format a drive, sectors combine to form a logical unit which is know as block or cluster).

Below mentioned are some of the useful names, which might be able to help you, reconstruct RAID and thereafter you may use a cloning application to create a single volume, which can be mounted as actual RAID volume. Once the volume is mounted, recovery becomes easier.

• File Scavenger (Quetek Consulting Corporation)
• R-Studio – RAID Tools
• RAID Reconstructor – GetDataback (Runtime Software)

If you are wondering about this new term U3 technology, you might ask what U3 technology is?

Visualize that you are having all your important applications, software in the same flash drive that has your important files stored. Storing and carrying away your software on the same flash drive that carries your files. That is what you can do with a U3 smart drive. You can plug this flash drive into any PC launch the applications to work, play a game, message friends, send email, and edit photos plus more. Most importantly, when you unplug it, you are not leaving any personal data behind.

U3 technology has been launched by SanDisk and is a revolutionary technology for the users who are looking for portability of having both data and applications.

Implication of U3 in data recovery

Imagine a laptop with a single partition, where important data is accidentally deleted or missing. Installing download or working on the drive would cause overwriting and your important data could be overwritten and permanently lost.

U3 flash drive having data recovery software would be extremely beneficial in those similar circumstances, running the application from the U3 device and recovering data to the same flash drive would be extremely handy. The U3 flash drive would become a handy recovery tool, which could be taken to any PC for recovering lost data and would become extremely powerful device for the administrators.

Native individuals or companies operating in or around San Diego should feel relieved when one of your hard drives from RAID array has gone bad and you need a replacement drive, Disocuntechnology can deliver the drive early the following morning if the requirement is extremely urgent.

DiscounTechnology.com, are a value-added reseller of information technology equipment, hardware and systems. Their range of products include SCSI hard drives, SATA & IDE desktop & laptop / notebook hard drives, drive caddies/trays, SAS (Serial attached SCSI) HDDs, mini-PCI wireless devices, SCSI RAID controllers, hot swap hard drives and other storage components.

In the field of enterprise storage, they offer Seagate, Cheetah, Maxtor, Atlas, Fujitsu, IBM & Hitachi UltraStar SCSI hard drives. However, they also offer Dell PowerVault SCSI attached arrays, Dell PERC RAID controllers, Adaptec SCSI controllers, hard disk caddies, SCSI drive trays, SCSI active negation terminators, interface adapters, cables including VHDCI and HD68 cables.

You can buy equipments from their online store, the website has online shopping cart mechanism installed and it even is offering low shipping rates for international customers.

Although DiscounTechnology.com is an authorised Cisco, Juniper/Netscreen & FatPipe Networks resellers, apart from selling storage devices. In case you do not see what you were looking on there website get in touch with them, they might be able to provide, what you were looking for.

Paraben Corporation, a digital and computer forensic expert company has released a new product called Cell Seizure Investigator Stick (CSI stick). CSI stick is a mobile forensic hardware tool kit.

The device is similar to a thumb drive and helps to create an image of the mobile, whether is logical or physical information of the drive. The device currently supports 330 Samsung and Motorola model of phones, Nokia and LG phones research and development is under progress as per the press release issued by the company.

This forensic tool surely is a one-step forward and a great tool for law enforcement agencies to create a secure replica of a mobile phone.

The package includes:

• One CSI Stick Base Unit
• Two Motorola Tips
• One Samsung Tip
• One Remote Charger
• Carrying Case

Are you looking for best option for your printer ink cartridge, a cost effective refilling option, a site where you can shop for almost all major printer models ink cartridges? Then here is a great site that might of interest to you, Carrot Ink.

We always curse the times when our ink cartridge runs out and we need to buy an expensive, genuine cartridge to substitute it? Well, you can give your worries a toss, because you can get easy on the pocket, excellent ink cartridges from CarrotInk.com at unbelievably low prices. In fact, high quality Carrot Inks sell for 30-70% less than that of the name brands.

You can purchase products marketed and manufactured by companies like Apple, Canon, Dell, HP, Epson, Xerox, Lexmark and others. You can also purchase specific products like Epson ink cartridges, HP 56 black, Canon ink cartridges, C6656AN, HP C6656 and many more.

Read more! »

RAID data recovery for many of us would be a new term. As we have learnt that, this expensive system is implemented to prevent data loss.

Frankly speaking, it is not like that, as we have understood RAID, they are fault-tolerant, but they are not data loss proof.

RAID 5 or RAID 1 implementations can bear the loss of a single hard drive, if multiple hard drives fail, or other serious problems occur which may include accidental formatting, deletion, virus attacks and most predominantly an inexperienced attempts to restore data or regeneration of failed drive mostly has caused these expensive RAID systems to fail.

The sudden failure of critical RAID storages who are backbone of information for any enterprises it eventually jeopardizes the reputation and business of any company.

So what is the role of these RAID devices with respect to RAID data recovery services?

RAID data recovery should be an integral part for any disaster management plan of enterprises. Moreover, RAID still offers redundancy and noteworthy performance expansion over single, non-arrayed hard drives.

Are you looking for a reliable RAID recovery services for your organization?

Disk Doctor Labs Inc. (www.diskdoctors.com) offers an extensive range of hard drive recovery service levels with minimal turnaround time depending on your resources (funds) and requirements. They are extremely affordable, successful, especially in this RAID recovery industry, with clients including all major top fortune 500 companies.

Asset management in an enterprise comprises of managing the computer hardware of desktops and servers. It also includes regular upgrade of the hardware for optimal performance and increasing requirements with latest applications, it includes latest operating system upgrade as well.

Are you an IT administrator and planning to upgrade your clients with latest Windows operating system? Checking the system requirements and performance related issues, you conclude that there is a serious requirement for upgrading memory for your entire client PC’s.

Branded PC’s from hardware giants like Dell, HP uses a particular brand, size and level of RAM module for a reason. Arranging all for your old PC’s could be a big problem, you also know upgrading with commonly available retail RAM modules could lead to various other unknown issues ranging from incompatibility, regular hanging of PC’s, and continuous crashing. Later returning the purchased items and managing the all unwanted hardware could lead new set of problems.

Imagine if you are able to find an online service that guarantees all memory modules purchased are an exact match of those originally installed at the factory. Memory Deal is such a service, which should be like music to the ears of any IT manager stung by an expensive and problematic memory upgrade.

www.memorydeal.net offers 2gb Memory Upgrade for users looking to upgrade from 512MB or 1GB RAM modules. They also offer server memory upgrades right from dell power edge to HP servers, including Apple Memory & MAC RAM. Individuals looking for PC3200 DDR400 SDRAM Upgrade can also visit the website for latest deals.

This new online memory product provider has a single unique focus - to provide customers the exact same RAM modules computer OEMs install at the factory.

The subset of my blog says, “Data loss and corruption are unfortunate realities that you need to guard against proactively” and it is one of the famous laws of “Murphy”.

The question arises, How to guard against data loss and corruption?

The answer is quite simple “Devotedly take backups and follow a strict backup plan”.

Backup techniques are different with respect to the user and computing environment, a SOHO user data primarily consists of emails, personal documents, photos, video, and audio, which is generally a collection for a long time and is a treasured piece of data.

They may also have specialized data generation which may include data generated from financial backup application such as “Quick books”, CAD, CAM packages like AutoCAD and many others.

The SOHO user with such type of data would use DVD, CD or external fire wire or USB hard drives to backup his data. To manage backup they can take help of applications such as Handy Backup, which can manage such data backup, the software is extremely easy to use and offers much easier restoration of backed up data.

Whereas, data backup requirements with large enterprises is complex and requires specialized hardware and software techniques, generally the data generated with enterprises is mainly large SQL or Oracle databases, also many type of financial, invoicing or ERP package generated data.

This huge volume of data requires special software, which can work in heterogeneous environments, for e.g. a company, might be hosting oracle databases on a Solaris server and SQL database on Windows 2003 server. Special backup agent applications can travel through all these different flavors of operating systems and can take backups or snapshots of data on periodical basis over network in SAN or NAS devices connected over fast Fibre or iSCSI network. There is lot of development in new data migration and backup techniques by companies like Symantec, CA (Computer Associates) when it comes to backup software and companies like EMC, Hitachi, and NetApp for backup hardware, which includes NAS and SAN devices.

Nevertheless, for users who are new to backups, I have come across this website, which has highlighted very good details on the history of backup’s i.e. History of Backup the website describes the evolution of backups with punch cards and the current backup market which includes SAN, NAS or online backup strategies. The website has valuable information presented on backups.

Repairing .pst files with “scanpst” has never been so successful. Most of the Outlook Mail Recovery software available in the market are quite efficient and can handle all sorts of corruptions with Outlook.

Disk Doctors Outlook Mail Recovery software is one of the helpful tool, which helps in recovering damaged .pst files. The demo version of the software is available for free download from the link mentioned below

Download free mail recovery Demo

The demo version of the software scans for damaged .pst file and allows user to view all his emails in somewhat similar style as Outlook. For real recovery, you have to pay for the software, the demo version would create a .pst file without body contents for your emails, notes etc.

The software has an elegant option of finding .pst files either by displaying the default outlook profile or a user can do a search on his drive if he is not aware of the path where generally outlook keeps its data file.

There were two notable scanning methods offering two level of scanning, one for minor corruptions and other one called “Smart Scan” for severe corruptions of the .pst file. The results when compared to scanpst.exe were far better, and were superior when compared with many other pst repair software which are popular.

The full version of the software creates a new pst file from the damaged pst file, the output pst file can be imported without any hassled in Outlook. The most common problems this software would be handy are

• Repairing 2GB oversized pst file from MS Outlook 2000
• Recovering lost mails, contacts and other attributes of organizing abilities of Outlook

A user who is looking to salvage data from corrupt pst should consider repairing pst file using this email recovery software as the results were better when compared even with many of the popular email recovery software. The software always recovered more number of emails from most of the pst I was able to corrupt.

Competitively priced application is not heavy on the pocket considering the value of pst files having loads of precious emails, contacts etc., if lost can create chaos for a long time to remember.

Most of the people have been writing about freeware “data recovery software” on their blogs and forums. By reading those articles and posts, it is imperative to know what exactly this hullabaloo about free data recovery software is.

Well, the most popular data recovery software have made life difficult for individuals who either are great believers of open source and have a concept that “software development is charity”, also people who are looking for cracked or free recovery software.

People have very different opinions about a data recovery software, they feel free tool even if is mere undelete is the best resource when we have a data loss. When they face complex data loss situation as compared to minor loss of data that includes deleted file recovery or recovering lost partitions from Windows, they turn back to those effective recovery software, which works only when it is purchased.

We at “bestrecoverysoftware” have already reviewed PC Inspector a free tool to recover files from Windows, like PC inspector there are some more free tools, that might help in recovering data and there is no denying in this.

Some of the free recovery tools might or might not be effective in recovering.

• Panda Recovery
• Undelete Plus
• ADRC data recovery software
• Avira Unerase Personal

Even though I am not a great believer of free recovery tools as they have always failed to recover when it is mostly required. But it does not means they would not work for anyone else, what I am trying to convey is that they are the entry level tools in terms of data recovery and should be considered only when your recovery requirements are related to recovering files after emptying your recycle bin, accidental deletion or simple partition recovery.

What should we do, we cannot afford recovery software?

The answer is simple, if the cost of the lost data is less then 4 times the cost of the software, never consider seriously about purchasing paid recovery software.

When you clone a partition from a source disk with read errors due to bad sectors to a new disk, Windows will cry and report bad sectors on the new disk.

To begin from the scratch, if you need to back up or clone partitions that use proprietary NTFS file systems, your options are to go back to DD or to use ntfsclone. This unimpressive but useful program is part of ntfsprogs package a multi utility archive for NTFS formatted disks. Most Linux distributions include the package, but if not, then building the tool from scratch is not much of a task.

Ntfsclone’s controls and functionality are similar of dd. For e.g.

ntfsclone - - save - image
- -output myimage.
img /dev/hda1

will save the first partition on the first disk to a file called myimage.img, and the following command will write the contents back to disk.

ntfsclone - - restore – image
- - overwrite
/dev/hda1/ myimage.img

If your original NTFS partition contains errors, ntfsclone will cancel the operation. Therefore, you need to use the - - rescue parameter with ntfsclone to keep reading in spite of errors, thus rescuing the partition.

Unless you are certain that the bad clusters were just an error, you should do a full disk surface scan using your hard disk manufacturer’s tools or Windows native chkdsk /r after doing this. This would help in marking those bad sectors and Windows should not report errors.

There are some disadvantages though:

1. should not be used by people not knowing what they are doing
2. it would be difficult to implement incremental backups

Unfortunately, with the expansion of the storage and the capacity, we are seeing massive growth in data with the enterprises or large organizations. This massive expansion of data or the information with organizations is creating a new problem, which is “Unstructured data” most of it is not in the form of any sort of database.

Unstructured data, which is not stored as database, is mainly spreadsheets, text or word files, images or sound files etc. and it accounts for 85% of organizations core information, but it is not always easy to find, manage, or access the file that has been archived properly with religious backup following.

In a recent survey consisting of a data of past 2 years, it has been estimated that more then $3B in fines have been levied against corporations that were unable to produce the right piece of information when it was demanded.

Fortunately, some new generation of text mining tools allows enterprises with large amount of unstructured data to extract key essential elements, find out associations between files, and can easily summarize the information. Many organizations are deploying or considering such software tools to deal with their piles of text.

“We are getting an increasing understanding of what things are possible with text mining,” says Alexander Linden, an analyst at Gartner Inc. “But there is a huge skills problem in this area, which is why it hasn’t gotten much traction so far.”

Softlogica has produced Handy Recovery a data recovery software. A popular company already known for its backup software called, “Handy Backup“.

The software impresses particularly with its well thought simple explorer like interface, which is not confusing like R-Studio or Stellar Phoenix. On launching the application, appearance of “tip of the day” demonstrates user friendliness, but just after that the screen goes blank and there are no “quick steps” to follow which could take you to the heart of the application.

Nevertheless, it is simpler to select the drop down list having a catalog of existing logical drives, and to continue recovery by pressing the “analyze” button. In addition, partition search method is easily accessible from the “Tool Bar“, if you are looking to recover data from lost or repartitioned drives.

The “Find Partition” option exhibits industrial strength, a slider to select different portion of a drive or to select a range of sectors to search for a partition is extremely helpful, this option comes in handy when user is aware about the location of the partition on the disk.

In some of the test cases performed, the software successfully recovered deleted files, recovered data from formatted and reformatted partitions, including ADS (Alternate Data Streams), compressed and encrypted files from both NTFS and NTFS 5 partitions.

The core algorithm designed to recover data seems to follow the correct path, the software in its first scan loads all the entries through $MFT and most of the times try to tag and arrange all the file / folder entries into the original hierarchy as they were before the data loss. This helps to provide same tree structure to identify and recover lost data without any hassles.

The “Extended” analysis option provides another important feature of “File Recovery” based on unique file identifiers, popularly known as “File Header", this search would locate unique file identifiers of the selected files types to recover.

Saving recovered data was a delight with this application as some of the small options were extremely helpful, for e.g. while recovering a folder or files from a tree it gives an option to recover data with or without original folder structure, this helps when you do not want the recursive folder structure.

The software has all the required options including, save or loading a recovery session or a partition scan, file filter or a find option for selective recovery. Finally, a must have application for everyone who is looking to recover crucial data from hard drives, USB drives etc. Leaving one or two options here and there, the software has appeared to work and most importantly recovered data.

Cracked software costs software industry billions every year, yet most of us view this form of burglary as normal internet activity. Do you go searching for cracks or serials over internet before buying any data recovery software just to see if you can get a free copy to test or may be recover your data?

The software crackers usually crack software for one simple purpose: dishonor. They crack any software to prove a point and to show, how smart they are then the creator of the software. What they do not know is that any copy protection system has holes in them and no software protection is 100% crack proof, so there is nothing, which they have proven. Instead, the company creates or implements better protection. Cracking software has several merits to Software Company in the form of viral marketing and much wanted traffic, but has various risk factors included for the user who is going to use these cracked applications.

Risks involved

Primarily, there is a real risk to your lost data and the hardware involved when using pirated software. If you do not know exactly what you are doing and you do not know exactly where the crack came from, you are putting yourself at risk for viruses and adware as a fair number of software patches and key generators come with embedded viruses and adware! Yes it is a fact even cracks are not free . Therefore, by using pirated software, you may be giving access to back door programs to access your system for even more serious crimes like data theft or even identify theft!

Another bona fide risk associated with using pirated software is that the software you are using may only be partially functional. To make piracy trickier, some companies insert “phantom” code that may affect certain functions when a crack is applied. The software instead of recovering your lost data might start filling binary digits on your drive like 0’s and 1’s and this might cause permanent deletion.

Pirated copy of the software also leaves you with little or no support for the software since you do not have a legitimate copy.

R-Studio has been around since 2002, or may earlier then that, but came into proper existence since 2002. It has been the first automated GUI application apart from Easy Recovery from Kroll Ontrack and Lost & Found (do not know where it has gone now?) who together were the most selling applications in retail and through websites.

The first time when got the chance to review R-tt’s “Recovery Studio” (might be the exact name thought by the developers, which they abbreviated later as R-Studio) it was an era of DOS based recovery applications. Even with its first release, the developers were able to design nice recovery software, which was able to recover data from both FAT & NTFS files systems.

Read more! »

We have left the snail mail behind, now is the age of email and this statement itself is too old to mention. So, coming to the realistic approach of the describing and saying about this topic, checking emails daily twice or thrice has become like a habit for us. For a professional two places that he has to manage emails one at office and other one at home for his personal emails

Nevertheless, it is a fact that data is continuously growing with everyone including enterprises, home users or with any body that is serious about data, with the increase in data has brought an exceptional amount of increase in the numbers of emails that we have to receive daily or store in our emails clients. Microsoft Windows being the most popular operating system brought the popularity of its emails clients Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook.

People who use Windows still are ignorant about choosing the correct email client for them. Talking about those who have facility to download emails (POP accounts, Exchange or any mail server). People with free email accounts with yahoo etc. can check emails only through IMAP accounts by using web based interface, some common differences between Microsoft Outlook Express and Outlook.

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When we loose our important data, we immediately search for data recovery application on the internet and get into it without even knowing, whether this would help in recovering my lost data?

I have come across many people calling in for help, though many prefer to call me who know me personally. When they start describing the problem, it becomes a never ending story. One of my friends who had bought a new notebook recently called me saying “I have deleted some of my folders which I created just below Deleted Items in Outlook". I have downloaded data recovery software from internet which is an “Undelete” program, now this program is running since 15 hours and still nothing is appearing, he added.

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Hello Folks, Lately I have been extremely busy with my product management work and wasn’t able to write or update on this web log. I was thinking to put something which is really catchy for someone who has lost his data and instead of googling around (slang most popular these days for search performed using “Google”) and downloading software which aggravates the problem, and it would be nice if he gets a list of the best recovery applications which he can download and find out which one is effective and would help him to recover his lost data.

So here goes my list of 10 best data recovery software for Windows operating system supporting both FAT & NTFS file system.

Please note: The product listed here are not freeware, you would need to purchase the software before using them to recover data. However, demo version capabilities might vary product wise.

• R-Studio by r-tt-dot-com ($79.99)
• Get Data Back – NTFS & FAT by Runtime-dot-org (Bundle $119)
• File Scavenger by Quetek-dot-com ($45)
• Active @ Undelete by active-undelete-dot-com ($39.95)
• Easy Recovery by ontrack-dot-com ($499)
• Recover My Files by recovermyfiles-dot-com ($69.95)
• Zero Assumption Recovery by z-a-recovery-dot-com ($39.95)
• Boomerang by boomdrs-dot-com ($199.95)
• Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery by stellarinfo-dot-com ($99)
• Disk Doctors FAT & NTFS Data Recovery Software by diskdoctors-dot-net (Bundle $119)

This is how, I would rate the applications. This rating is temporary and I would keep on reshuffling or adding products based on their capabilities. So no position is permanent for any application.

I would be covering detailed review for each product in my coming posts, also would be covering reviews about other non-listed recovery applications in various categories (for e.g. Email Recovery, MAC recovery etc.), but I need some time download them and evaluate and put in the final review.

Disclaimer
We do not represent or warrant that this data recovery blog, any suggested tools, software, advice, opinion, statement, information, content or online services will be error-free or will meet any particular criteria of accuracy, completeness, reliability, performance or quality. You acknowledge that any reliance upon any such tools, software, advice, opinion, statement or information shall be at your sole risk. We reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to correct any errors or omissions in any portion of this website.

I used to consider this company with its products like Cpatain Nemo, explorer software for Novell servers. I think working with different file systems they got to a great extent needed experience to create an application for data recovery.

The inheritance of GetDataBack has been laid out on the software like Disk Explorer a hex viewer tool. Using this software for more than 3-4 years I got to know more about the usage of this application and got an idea about its recovery capabilities.

GetDataBack is available in two versions; one for recovering data from NTFS formatted drives and other one for recovering data from FAT partititons. I have no complaints about these two separate versions, but a user who is not much aware of the file system might find it difficult to select the file system and even might get confused when to use the application, in case of reformatting from one file system to another.

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Currently bunch of tools are available in data recovery software category, mostly they are categorized under “File and disk management”, they still not have been able to achieve special appreciation in software industry as distinctive product category. The most popular desktop utilities have been Anti-Viruses, System optimization applications which are destined for safeguarding computer system from threats of viruses, Trojans and Malwares or by improving system performance by using bunch of optimization tool. However I still feel either data recovery services or software hasn’t got the recognition which it requires.

Lately, lots of data recovery service companies have started their operations around the globe, but if I recall the start of the millennium we had very few companies such as Kroll Ontrack, DriveSavers, Actionfront (Seagate Services now) etc providing data recovery services from physically or logically crashed drives. The type of data loss was limited to viruses and human errors, but the scenario has changed with invent of complex storage solutions designed by companies like EMC, Hitachi or NetApps etc.

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Contd…

Deleted file recovery, formatted drive recovery, lost partition recovery are some of the options offered by this software to recover data from both FAT and NTFS drives. In some of the tests performed software was able to recover deleted files from both FAT and NTFS drives. It is not so important to mention that overwritten files and fragmented files were not recovered as recovering them using any recovery software is not possible.

However, I expected much from the hex viewer of this software but finally was disappointed as it came out as a mini version of WinHex in a read-only mode. I felt it was wastage of serious programming hours unless they are planning a better release of this component. The hex editor would not be that helpful even for a professional.

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When I was planning to review Active @ Undelete I always had an impression about them as good NTFS recovery software. I suddenly realized I have seen something similar to Active @ undelete than I explored my collection of shareware and found Arax Disk Doctors which was quite similar to Active @ undelete.

Looking at the two applications the same old question arises “The chicken or the egg? ” There is so much similarity in both these applications that the lost partition search mode takes exactly the same time in both the applications. The user interface of both the applications seems to be from a common UI factory.

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Disk Defragmenter is a system utility provided by Windows for analyzing local logical drives, further locating and combining fragmented files and folders within blocks (clusters) of hard drive. You also can defrag logical drives from a command line using defrag command.

When we save a file it is divided in small stripes and saved on clusters, concerning the size of a cluster the number of fragments are created, for example to save a file of 16KB we need 4 clusters if the size of cluster to hold data is 4KB. Now it is not fixed that all these stripes would be saved in a contiguous fashion.

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When a partition table gets deleted, corrupted or lost in general, only its entry is removed from first sector of the hard drive; and although the data is no longer available, it still remains on the disk pending to get overwritten. Expert recovery tools can locate lost file systems even if partition table information is missing. Irrespective of the file system and operating system, partition table is always the first physical sector of a hard drive which starts from 0, 0 and 1 which means the 0th cylinder, a 0th head and the 1st sector.

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In my opinion free software should allow that it can be used, studied, and modified without any restriction, and it can be copied and farther distributed in modified or unmodified form. To make this possible the program (called the source code) must be made available. Even though when this application cannot be tagged as an open source it still is available free of cost of recovery.

This application unlike others does not provide the setup using famous “Inno” but uses Install Shield which looks impressive and does the installation quite simply. The application is a multilingual application supporting English, German, French, Italian and Spanish.

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Fault tolerance, using replication and redundancy to maintain data integrity, has evolved considerably since its inception and promises to continuously develop at an even clip. With data having taken over from hardware components as the backbone of the IT industry, data reliability is a key issue in today’s systems.

The concept of Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) aimed at ensuring data integrity has been around for some time now but, with rapid advancements being made in technology everyday, assumes greater significance today than at any other time. Progressive development in disk technologies coupled with reducing costs of hard disks has made RAID even more useful and prevalent in today’s IT scenario.

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Similar to human, files do have ghost , when you delete a file considering it to be a god like behavior. Now, what happens if you empty the Recycle Bin? Surely that’s the end of the file’s life? We feel that file is gone but with an undelete utility there’s a good chance you can bring back the file to life like a ghost – so once file is back the only thing which comes to mind is Murphy’s law “The probability of a hard-disk crash increases with the number of days since the drive was last backed up”. So we start thinking of putting up a serious backup mechanism in place and think that we would follow our backup procedures religiously but again Murphy has a saying for this “You can’t prevent disasters, but you can diminish their frequency and severity”.

Ok, so now the real stuff is you’ve deleted a file or files, and sent them to the Recycle Bin. Then, being careful, you emptied the Recycle Bin to free up the disk space.

Oops! Your wedding pictures were in that folder! Or the pictures of your Hawaii trip.

And those pictures are gone!

Google “undelete” and try third party undelete applications.

Of course the most important precaution, the less work you do with your computer, in the meantime, the better your chances of recovering your deleted files/folders intact. Saving more files on the same partition would cause permanent data loss as new files might overwrite orphaned deleted data.