Everyone loses data sooner or later, but preparation can serve as inexpensive insurance.
Have you ever noticed how some of the most interesting stuff winds up in your junk email folder?
Emails come in from all over the world and wind up right there in your personal email junk folder. These messages, written usually in variants of English, though I have seen some in Chinese, promise everything from great jobs, where you will have to work only two or three hours a day, to relationships with lonely women who supposedly got your name somewhere, to flawless replica watches, to human growth products designed to make you more appealing in a world where size matters.
Lately it seems, however, that some of these emails are turning nasty and saying things like access to your bank account has been frozen, or your Internet account is about to be turned off, along with other threatening messages designed to intimidate you. Recently, I had one saying that Lehman Brothers was filing for bankruptcy and that my account was frozen. Can you imagine! Oh, wait a minute. That was a news bulletin....
It seems that there is beginning to be a reality blur between the fraudsters online and the fraudsters on Wall Street. I think the two have something in common, however. Both are playing to the false hopes and dreams that you can get something for nothing--a great deal, a better return on your investment, an unimaginable profit, a four-bedroom home with nothing down. But what is life without dreams, and what are dreams if not for a better life?
It may be that you opened the wrong email, and your dreams for a productive afternoon were shattered when you unleashed a virus onto your computer that started deleting files. Perhaps you wound up deleting a few needed files in the course of attempting to get rid of the pesky virus. It happens to the best of us.
Imagine you are quietly drinking a glass of wine one evening and decide to sit down at your computer at home and do a little housekeeping or maybe sync your new hard drive with your old, deleting all those space-robbing duplicate files. Oops! You just got the little red arrows mixed up with the little green arrows, and instead of syncing the drives, you erased all non-duplicated files! Too bad, eh? But don't feel bad; it could happen to anyone.
They say that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so just accept that you're human and that you're going to make a mistake occasionally. There is going to come a time, sooner or later, when you are going to lose data. I don't care how careful you are; it will happen. Let's assume that you have a backup...somewhere. Most of us don't have high availability solutions running; that's for financial institutions (and it appears that's not going to save them from their current problems). Your backup is on a disk or some removable medium. How current is it? Did you back up five minutes ago? No. You backed up last night, or last week, or, more likely, last month. So now you're starting to think, "If I just don't write over the deleted files, I can probably recover them." Unfortunately, you didn't load your file recovery software onto your computer before you lost your data. So now you have to go on the Internet, download the software, and very likely overwrite the files that you want to recover in the process of loading the recovery software.
Let's see. Could there be a better way? I know.... What if we load the recovery software onto the computer before we lose the data? OK, we're betting against ourselves here and against our perfect new $1,800 laptop that of course will never let us down the way the old one did because...hey, it's new. Let's face it, if you didn't believe that, you couldn't justify the expense. Moving past that fantasy, let's consider possible options. We know you're broke now after the hardware expense, so you're going to want something cheap.
If you look through your utilities, such as Norton, you may find that you already have a data recovery solution loaded on your computer. If not, one of the most popular PC data recovery solutions today is VirtualLab Data Recovery, current version being 5.5.17. There have been nearly six million downloads of this utility from cnet download.com, which is a testament either to herd mentality or something that works. The trial version only allows you to preview the recovered data, which is common with this type of utility. If you wish to purchase it, it's $39.95, which isn't free, but it's not too bad considering it's really six data recovery programs in one and you can even use it to recover those deleted files from your camera card. It claims to recover files from formatted drives as well as corrupted drives, including RAID drives, which has been improved in the latest version. It also supports flash drives, thumb drives, even Mac volumes as well as Outlook and Thunderbird email. VirtualLab can make a sector-by-sector disk image of a failing drive in order to recover the data more safely. Most file systems are supported, including Vista's NTFS5 and Mac HFS/HFS+.
There are a number of other data recovery products available, including Pandora Recovery 2.0.1, Recover My Files, Recover Files 2, Migo Digital Rescue, Data Recovery Wizard, Handy Recovery, and Quick Recovery.
But the question is, as always, will yours work when you need it? Try taking one of those Radio Shack electro-magnets to your flash drive if you want to give it a challenging test. Let me know how it turns out.
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