I’m aware Raymond’s covered recovery of data in his articles before, in it, he recommends a lot of data recovery tools. His suggestions, like many of those out there, echo the need for a better system of backing up. One of my friends has perfected such a solution for himself. He uses a RAID 10 configuration that he has manage to customize into a nutcase paradise. For those not familiar with RAID 10, it is a mirrored data set (RAID 1) which is then striped (RAID 0), making the “10″ name. A RAID 10 array requires a minimum of four drives – two mirrored drives to hold half of the striped data, plus another two mirrored for the other half of the data. And he’s using this on Windows, along side a 1:1:1 imaging system, that not only backs up the RAID 10 configuration to another hard drive, but copies it also to DVD too.
Now, while this might seem like a perfect solution to many people, this is overkill and not only is this friend crazy for his data, but he’s lost his mind [which I might add, I’ve told him a lot on occasion]. There is such a thing as being too religious over your data. And while I admit, I’ve suffered data loss in the past because I don’t practice a RAID solution, I feel that if you back your data up right, you won’t have to worry about it. Since one of our forum members had lost some data in a disk failure today, I’d like to walk you though the steps I’ve managed to use to get the majority of my data back and hopefully this guide will be a handy one for you.
I’d just like to point out that the majority of these programs are free of charge and you might have heard of them before.
Raymond’s covered Recuva, as have many other blogs. For good reason. Out of my test data that was deleted, Recuva has time and time again either recovered portions or full bits of information from my hard drives. Unless the data was shreded, usually I was able to recover it in good form and able to use it again. It’s actually saved my behind on two finals for my courses thus far, so if you’re simply deleted it, check the recycle bin, then check this program.
RawCopy’s interface is dead simple for a reason: when recovering data from a disk gone RAW, you do not want, nor do you need the aggravation of digging out a manual to understand something. RawCopy provides a free service of a 1:1 copy of your data that it can recover from your dying hard disk. And from my reading, if your disk is slipping away faster then you thought, RawCopy will help you to the best of it’s abilities. If you’d like an unorthodox trick that might just prolong it’s death a big longer, putting the hard drive in a freezer until it gets a little cold might just give you that few extra seconds it needs.
Finally, prevention is the best course of action when it comes to data loss. If you back up your important data to DVD/CD, flash drive, or external hard drive, you’ll have it there if you need it. And for those that are wondering how I back up my data these days to prevent data loss, it’s a rather simple, yet complex one at the same time. I keep a 1:1 compressed image made by Clonezilla on my second hard drive on my desktop, of my desktop and laptop, as well as backing up all my important data (non-OS stuff) to an external hard drive. I also use a different Roadkil tool for the backup of my parent’s data, which is 1:1 networked copy to a secondary computer, so if one computer fails, the other has all the data on it and is ready to be swapped out at any time. That tool would be Roadkil’s Unstoppable Copier which I would only recommend if your data is in use at the time of copying files over. Seeing as Linux has a lot of built-in tools as well as command line tools to help you, my only recommendations are to keep up with the articles, as later this week I shall cover that very subject.
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