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.”