MFT Data Recovery

   Over the years I have recovered many drives configured with NTFS.  One of the leading reasons that data recovery is performed on these hard drives is an anamoly developed in the Master File Table.  This area of the drive is the single most important set of data stored on your system.  The Master File Table houses all attributes, as well as cluster placement for every file on your system.  It contains security attributes, file name attributes, date and time signatures, and a mini FAT called a run list that points to every cluster where a  particular file is stored.

  In addition to the infomation stored in the Master File Table it has been my experience that if a previous copy of the Master File Table had been saved off into a file onto a remote site I could have easily imported that file and used it to recover the data.  In other words, it is rarely the occasion that an entire file system gets totally wiped out.  It is usually some small piece of information either corrupted or omitted from the Master File Table that causes the problem.  Even a restore disk used on a hard drive that totally destroys all remnants of a file system cannot keep a backup copy of the Master File Table from recovering some data.

  How, you may ask can this be?  Well grasshopper, read on and see.  Imagine a book.  A reference book preferably.  Now, let us define the attributes of a reference  book.  Lets see, there is a forward where the author may offer a few remarks so we know how intelligent he is.  There is a table of contents that give you a general idea of what is in the book and where it is located. There is the body of the book, the actual information.  Last but not least, an index.  A detailed description, with page numbers that tell you exactly where the data is that you are looking for. For illustration purposes we can  say that the index of the book is the Master File Table, and the body of the book is the data on your hard drive.  If the index of the book is ripped out of the back, how would it be possible to find the information you are looking for?  I suppose you could wade through the entire book and possibly, after several hours of searching, find the answers you are looking for.  I have done that with some of my older books where the back, and the front of the book have disappeared.   A book may have 200, 300, 400, maybe even 500 pages to look through, and if the information is important enough it is worth the look.  However, wouldn’t it have been easier if I would have just photo copied the index and placed that in a nice safe place.  Then, when the book gets old, and I lose the index, I have this nice copy that I have kept to help me find my information.

   Leafing through a 500 page book may be time consuming but it is feasible, however, apply that same logic of the index and the book to a hard drive.  Who wants to scan through 234,000,000 sectors looking for data.  If the data is fragmented then the data is probably lost.  Wouldn’t have been nice to have a copy of the Master File Table to use and find all of your old tax returns, or doctoral thesis, or the only pictures of your grandsons birth?  I would say, “Yeah!! It would’ve been nice!”. 

  Please don’t get the wrong idea.  This is not the same as entire backup, on another set of media.  There are holes to this system.  First, if the drive actually goes bad, then it will be difficult if not impossible to get the data back.  Secondly, any thing that writes to the data portion of the drive will make the Master File Table useless. However, it takes a long time to destroy a 250 GB  hard drives data area.  Lastly, I have not been able to find a piece of software that just dumps the Master File Table to a remote site.  Looks like someone should write one?

The History Of Backup

Being a data recovery company it is important to recognize backup solutions and get that information into the hands of our readers. We review different backup solutions and try to give the latest and most up to date information about data backup. While I was researching different types of backup programs I came across a website that was devoted to the history of backup.

The History Of Backup

This website features important milestones in the history of data backup , and its evolution from punched cards and magnetic tape reels to the emergence of network technologies with complex systems for remote backup storage. I highly recommend this site to anybody that has data backup concerns or is interested in protecting their data.

Knowing the history of backup can help you determine what the best solution for you or your companies data backup plan. Backup has come a long way over the last decade. With the addition of high capacity hard disk drives and even high capacity DVD writers and disks such as Blu-Ray and HD DVD allow for the backup of anywhere from 24 to 54 GB’s of data.

This site is essential to anyone looking for a solid backup plan. If you have any questions about storage visit The History of Backup.

Backing Up Solutions Backup To DVD

As most of you know by now, I run DTI’s 24 hour emergency data recovery support line. I get a lot of calls at all hours of the day and night from people and companies that didn’t have a proper data backup solution in place. Recently my wife Victoria and I have been posting articles about the different types of data backup we have been trying out. We have been researching external hard drives, NAS devices, DVD backup, imaging and recovery and restoration software. Today I am going to review one of the better pieces of backup software that we have been trying out: Backup Platinum. This and all of our reviews are our opinions and recommendations and don’t represent any relationship between the products and services and dtidata.com, Inc.

Backup To DVD - CD-RW - USB - FTP - LAN Software

There are many programs that backup to DVD including the systems that come standard in most computers like Dells and HP. The thing they have in common are their limitations to backup to other media. This is one of my favorite features of Backup Platinum. I can use their easy to comprehend set up wizard to backup my data to my USB devices, over the network to my Buffalo NAS, or better yet to my off site webservers through FTP! Not only do they offer “on the fly” compression, but more importantly 128 bit encryption with Blowfish. The cool thing is you can use the encryption either together with the compression or separately.

As far as installation and set up goes, it was a piece of cake. Even the most advanced functions like setting Backup Platinum as a Windows service was easy. This is an important feature since when it is set up as as a service it will backup computer files whether you are logged in or not.

Once installed I then set up the scheduler. Another great feature, the versatile scheduler allows for quite a bit of flexibility in the times when you want the backup software to run. You can even set up different days and times for different files! I found this particularly useful when addressing my email backups. There are some files and folders that don’t need to be backed up as often as others, as well as other incremental backups that need to be performed often.

For those that don’t have the capabilities to backup to DVD, they have the answer for you! With the CD-R and CD-RW capabilities, Backup Platinum can span files that are larger than the capacity of your CD. They make it very easy to organize your CD’s by automatically splitting the data sets.

Backup Platinum Features:

• Full CD-RW and DVD support with disk spanning
• Backup and synchronize with LAN and FTP
• Integrated ZIP compression
• 128-bit encryption with Blowfish
• Flexible and powerful scheduler
• Can run in service mode on Windows NT/2000/XP
• CRC verification when writing on CD/DVD
• Quick erase option for CD/DVD
• Speed selection for CD/DVD burning
• Flexible file selection and file masks handling
• Multi-threaded transfer engine that executes backups in the background with minimum system resource consumption
• Command line interface for professional users
• Ability to store multiple versions of backup files with timestamps
• A number of options to specify default actions executed without user interaction when running in service mode
• Option to run backup on log on/log off
• Options to set any other program to run before or after processing an item
• Backup of selected registry keys
• MD4/MD5 password authentication for FTP servers
• Import/export of all settings and registration status
• Option to restore to a folder different from the original one
• E-mail notification about operation results
• Support for SMTP servers requiring authorization
• Ability to choose priority for the background backup process
• Option to wait N minutes after logon before processing backups
• Activity log in RTF format with the option to automatically ZIP old log files
• Choice between more and less detailed log view
• Windows XP compatible user interface

I would recommend Backup Platinum to anyone that values their data. Created bySoftLogica LLC, who focuses on the development, marketing and support of file and network management tools and utilities.

In conclusion if you are looking far a backup solution and want to avoid data recovery, I suggest you give Backup Platinum a shot. They have a fully functional 30 day trial, so download a data backup demo and give it a test run!

Backup Solution Western Digital My Book Review

A while ago I wrote a post about Western Digital Hard Drive Recovery that outlined different WD hard disks. I had mentioned the My Book as being one of the best solutions. Now that I have been using them (I bough 2 more) I wanted to give everyone a review.

While DTI doesn’t officially recommend any products, we can tell you our honest opinions. Since my husband Michael and I work from our home we have a lot going on, more than the average household. We have 6 computers on our primary network that also has a Network Attached Storage Device attached to it. We are very paranoid about losing data so we have a few backup plans in place. At first the My Book was being used for just backing up, but since Michael has been getting more involved with music producing he has been using the My Book as a full service drive.

We are both very impressed not only with the speed and capacity (1.5 TB), but also how cool it runs. The My Book Premium Edition 2 has 2 hard drives that can either be mirrored or striped depending on if you want safety or performance. We went for performance since everything is backed up on the NAS. The drive is fantastic in every aspect of what we do. We are using Firewire 800 and have it hooked up to one of our Kubuntu machines and it screams!

If you are looking for a solid external hard drive whether for storage or as backup to avoid hard drive recovery, this is the best we have ever used. As far as technical specs I grabbed the main points off of the WD site. If anyone has any questions please leave a comment.

WD’s My Book™ Premium Edition II dual-drive storage system offers RAID mirroring for extra data protection or RAID striping for extraordinary capacity and performance. Triple-interface and a powerful combination of features and performance make this system the storage solution of choice for creative professionals, workgroups, small offices and anyone looking for extra assurance that their data is safe.

My Book Premium Edition II Features

Extraordinary capacity - With up to 1.5 TB of storage in an elegant, small footprint design, you have plenty of space to store an entire digital photo library, your HD movie collection and hours and hours of DV video.Extra data protection - For extra data protection, dedicate half the capacity for mirroring and automatically and instantaneously back up data every time you save it. Extra-fast performance - The lighting-fast combination of FireWire 400/800 and RAID striping yields the speed you need for fast, smooth video editing, an extra-responsive Photoshop scratch disk, rendering complex 3D objects or special effects, and saving huge blocks of data in record time. Easy to set up, easy to use - You’re up and running in a few simple steps. RAID configuration is easy with WD’s intuitive RAID Wizard software User serviceable - Easy access allows you to open the case and replace a drive. No need to send the entire system in for service. Triple interface - Provides flexibility and performance with connections for ultra-fast FireWire 800, as well as FireWire 400 and USB 2.0. WD Backup Software - A simple file-based backup system that’s extremely easy to use. Capacity gauge - See at a glance how much space is available on your storage system. Intelligent drive management features - Automatic power-up, Safe Shutdown™, and LED activity lights make this storage system especially easy to use. Quiet and cool - An efficient convection cooling system and a thermostatically controlled fan keep this unit reliably cool and remarkably quiet.

Hard Drive Data Recovery Backup Solutions

DTI Data performs hundreds of hard drive recovery cases every week. For the most part the unfortunate users did not back up their data and were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Hard Drive Data Recovery is the actual restoration of data files off of a damaged hard disk.

If you are unsure of what backup solutions you need to avoid hard drive recovery check out some of our previous posts on backing up.

Backup Data And Avoid Hard Drive Recovery

Our head of hard drive data recovery support is Jacqui Best, and she has written a few great articles on data back up.

• External Hard Drive For Data Backup - in this post Jacqui goes into detail about what external USB drives are and how they can be used to avoid hard drive recovery.
• Test Your Back Up Plan - no one wants to need hard drive data recovery, and even though you might be diligent about backing up your data, read this post on how to check your backups and verify your data is safe.

I also wrote a couple of back up posts that talk about the different options available:

• Hard Disk and Tape Back Up Comparison - a lot of companies use tapes as back up, but are they as reliable as hard disk backups? Even though disk failure can lead to hard drive recovery, tapes aren’t the only solution.

The moral of this story is to backup your data so you don’t need us or hard drive recovery!

Data Backup Solutions External USB Hard Drives

External USB hard drives and what they are really for.

I would say that a large portion of our physical data recovery business comes from hard drives inside USB external enclosures. For someone who had been dealing with hardware and technology for over fifteen years it makes perfect sense why. For those not in the know I am going to explain to you why, and what you should be using these devices for, and what you should not be using them for.

First, you have to understand that a hard drives worst enemy is heat. I am sure you have seen it maybe in a cheap frying pan. You heat it up cook in it and then turn and stick it in the sink and run water over it. The next time you bring that pan out it doesn’t sit quite right on the stove any more and over time it really gets to rocking. This is because over time heating the metal and then cooling it down has caused the pan to warp. The same thing happens with hard drives that get to hot. Since, with the external USB chassis, the hard drive is completely incased in metal with a little tiny fan they get VERY hot. (We actually call them hot boxes around here) Sometimes they get so hot that the motor will melt and seize.

The next thing you should know is that I am a huge fan of these devices. I think they have the ability to really be helpful, and useful if not abused.

What NOT to do with your external hard drive:

1. They should never be used as an upgrade to your computer. If you want more constant hard disk space, buy a new hard drive and install it into the internal machine.
2. Although hard drives over the years have become much more durable, they are still a fine tuned piece of equipment and should be treated as such. You shouldn’t be moving it around and banging into it while it is on and running.
3. When you are not using it turn it off. Remember: Heat is bad.

What I feel are good uses of external USB devices:

1. As a back up they are great! You plug them in, back off the data, and unplug them. This will keep run time down to a minimum, and you will have a large amount of storage area, unlike backing off to CD’s.
2. To move data from one machine to another. A perfect example of this is from work machine to your home computer.
3. They are a great tool for data recovery. You can plug the bad hard disk into the device, and now have access to it without having to open your machine up. (I personally use them for this reason and I never put the cover on.)

I hope this helps you make a decision about whether an external USB hard drive is the right option for you. Remember to back up and avoid data recovery!

Data Backup: Test Your Recovery Solution

Disaster Recovery Plans Test Your Backup Solution

You might think that disaster recovery only applies to large companies or businesses. As far as I’m concerned, if I lost all the pictures of my kids or all my recipes, that would be a major disaster!

It isn’t enough to have a plan but you must TEST that plan.

About a month ago I was doing a refinance on my house and the mortgage broker was one I have used a few times for different things. When we were discussing what I was doing for a living, she was very interested because she had just lost a ton of data to a bad hard drive.

When the hard disk went down, she called her IT guy of course, and he went to the backup. The backup was bad, and subsequently she had a lot of work to re-enter. I explained to her, that although I was a little appalled that the IT person had not had the forethought to at least test the backups he was making, that it is common practice. I got with some people at the office here, and the general school of thought was that she should implement a disaster recovery “fire drill”. Now I am sure you’re wondering what exactly what that is, so I will explain.

Let’s say every 3-4 months, she comes in, and calls her IT guy and has him come out. Once he gets there she says to him “Now I want you to pretend my server hard drives have crashed and I want you to get me my data. I don’t have a ton of money to give to a data recovery company!” She has now put the IT person in the position of having to prove that the back ups are viable, also she will get an accurate count on how long it will take to get back up and running. If he is unable to produce her data, and the backup is bad, then they know they have problems with the disaster recovery plan. They can then tweak it to be more efficient and produce a better result.

I can not stress enough how important it is to have a data recovery plan and test that backup plan. If you do this you will be left with little down times and little to no data loss.

Backup Solutions: Hard Disk or Tape Comparison

Data Backup Hard Disk Drives or Tapes, Which is Best For Your Business?

Data Recovery companies are probably the most aware of backup solutions that fail. I hear it 20 or 30 times a week and I only answer Exchange Server support calls! We are always asked “what is the best backup solution?” The answer depends a lot on your situation. Every business is different whether in architecture or budget. Since I am comparing tape backup to disk drive backup the scenario for this article is a small business that handles lots of data.

I am going to use a situation that is a real life case study, though the names have been changed to protect the guilty!

SMB Small Medium Business Network Storage Backup

The company that called was a medium law office near the tip of the Florida panhandle. They found us by searching for “server data recovery companies in florida “ They have 4 senior partner lawyers and 2 other junior attorneys. Along with their secretaries, legal assistants, paralegals, accountants and other office staff the total computers on the network was 24 desktops, 1 print/fax/file scanning server, and Microsoft Small Business Server. They had a custom Sharepoint application that was used for scanning and storing the scanned legal documents.

While they are well below the max number of clients on Small Business Server they still didn’t have a separate domain server, it was all on SBS. The problems started when they came to work on Monday and saw the server had rebooted. At first glance you wouldn’t think that was a problem, but Exchange Server is funny about unplanned reboots. They call it a dirty shutdown and it almost always leads to Exchange Server Data Recovery.

When their users couldn’t connect to their email after Exchange was restarted, they realized the information stores weren’t started. At this point they called a local network company because like so many SMB’s they don’t have an IT person let alone an IT department! Once the consultant got there she started running the standard Microsoft Exchange Server Disaster Recovery Plan.

Fortunately she was familiar with our website and backed up the MDBDATA folder prior to running ESEUTIL. Well like so many sad stories I hear every day, the disaster recovery failed and they moved swiftly into restoring from a backup tape. They had a Quantum DLT 4 tape drive on their print server which was running Backup Exec.

		Enterprise-Class Features for SMB Backup 320 GB compressed* capacity 72 GB/hour compressed* performance Certified “Backup Ready” Solutions

I get so many calls from people that use Backup Exec and have problems. Most of them are due to the software not being configured properly or changes due to OS updates that throw the backup schedule off. And like so many companies they never checked their backups to see if they worked.

In general running a weekly brick level backup (which backs up the entire server) and then incremental daily is a good plan, but in this case the whole backup set was corrupt. We ended up having them send us the priv1 edb and stm files to us on an external hard drive for data recovery. They got a new Exchange database up and running following another one of my blog posts: how to get Exchange working without reinstalling. And was able to Ex-Merge their PST’s back into the clean database.

Our Chief Exchange Engineer John Best pointed them to our post on How To Backup Exchange With Windows Native Backup and they were on their way! During the many calls between our staff and the different attorney’s they realized their backup plan leaved a lot to be desired. Working with their on site consultant we put together an inexpensive disaster recovery plan, not just for Exchange, but for their entire network!

Brick Level Bare Metal Backup and Hard Drive Recovery

One of the best solutions that won’t cost you an arm or a leg is bare metal disk to disk backup. In this series of articles I will be comparing the pros and cons of each system and which we have found to be the best to prevent hard drive recovery. When looking at the best solution for your company you need to isolate your storage and backup needs. A law firm which archives tons of documents are prime candidates for tape library systems, but if something happens (and it always does) the question is “how fast do I need access to all of our archived documents?” If the answer to that question is “QUICKLY” then tape is probably not the way to go.

Tape backup doesn’t really allow for you to browse through and pick and choose what you need, you have to load the tape, and maybe if your lucky view the contents, but unless you have been real detailed about the hierarchy of the contents, it can still be days of searching, trial and error for you to find any specific data.

A hard drive or disk based backup system mirrors your data, so you have easy and almost instant access to the data on any given machine. Looking at a granular level, if Betty in Accounting has lost her hard drive, a brick level bare metal solution images her drive and restores the whole hard drive sector by sector to the last save point. Then the incremental is applied and she is back in business in a couple of hours worst case scenario.

I know it sounds like I have already sold out tape drives, but they do have benefits. My next article will go over them as well as a real scenario where tape and disk backups where BOTH in play (these clients were real paranoid and a good thing too!)

Backup Solutions 2: Small Network Attached Storage

Greetings! I am working on a whole series of article that deal with data safety. As an employee of a hard drive recovery service I see a lot of data recovery case studies. The fact is everyone faces data loss at one time or another. My post about How and Why Hard Drives Fail has gotten a lot of attention and has raised a lot of questions. The most common is what do we do about it? Well, backup your data! Last week I wrote about external hard drives as an option for backup. This is a good solution for some, but what about those of you that have a home network?

My husband Michael and I both work from home. We have 2 dedicated broadband Internet connections. Our network is both wireless and wired. We have 4 primary business machines as well as a laptop and our children’s computers. A while back Michael’s computer died and we faced data loss. It turned out that it wasn’t just the hard disk drive that was the problem, but heat within the case caused his hardware to stop functioning properly. Read my post about how Heat Kills Hard Drives  if you are worried about needing hard drive recovery someday.

To make a long and sad story short, Michael ended up going to dell.com to buy a new computer. While he was configuring his new dream machine, the online options asked about storage devices. We were happy to see a major computer company adding storage and backup solutions along with their machines. One of things we were always concerned about Dell is their penchant for offering dual hard drive configurations set up with RAID 0. This is the most dangerous setup imaginable. If one drive fails, that is it, you need hard drive recovery services.

At least now they are offering good options including external hard drives at a good price. We ended up going with a NAS device. This is wikipedia’s definition of a NAS:

Network-attached storage (NAS) is the name given to dedicated data storage technology that can be connected directly to a computer network to provide centralized data access and storage to heterogeneous network clients.

Heterogeneous? I think it would be good to add that definition as well:
Main Entry: het·ero·ge·neous
Pronunciation: “he-t&-r&-’jE-nE-&s, “he-tr&-, -ny&s
Function: adjective
Etymology: Medieval Latin heterogeneus, from Greek heterogenEs, from heter- + genos kind — more at KIN
: consisting of dissimilar or diverse ingredients or constituents : MIXED
- het·ero·ge·neous·ly adverb
- het·ero·ge·neous·ness noun

So now that we know what we are talking about, a NAS device is a good thing. It basically sits on the network as a virtual or “mapped” drive.

We ended up going with a Buffalo device:

Terabyte Network Attached Storage - 1.0 TB
Model: HD-H1.0TGL/R5

Features:
Solid Business Storage Solutions
• Four operating modes for configuring internal drives allow either data access in a massive volume or in fault tolerant RAID arrays
• Journaling File System to prevent loss of data during writing in the event of a power loss
• Robust user and group level permissions for securing network data shares (not Active Directory)
• Gigabit Ethernet with Jumbo Frame support ensures speedy delivery of large office files or multiple multimedia streams
• UPS compatibility to allow automatic or manual shutdowns safely when power is interrupted

 So far it has worked very well. We are using built in software to do complete backups of our important data. When we get a computer and have it all set up, or make major changes to an existing computer, we use Speed Clone to make a sector by sector copy of our hard drives. If something happens, we just slap in the cloned drive and restore our incremental data backups off of our new Buffalo device. This is the best way we could think of to prevent hard drive recovery services.

There are a ton of options when looking at NAS devises. By far the most popular is SNAP. Due to their saturation of the SAN/NAS marketplace we see a lot of these devices arrive needing SNAP Server Data Recovery. SNAP not only comes in many models including standalone and RAID configurations, but it has it’s own proprietary operating system called Guardian OS. Based loosely on Free BSD, it is an absolute nightmare when it comes to SAN NAS Data Recovery. Fortunately DTI has the means to recover data from SNAP devices.

Hopefully this article has helped you in making an informed decision about NAS devises as a backup solution. We all have important data. Try to avoid hard drive data recovery by backing up your disks!