Thirty years ago the Internet was a fledgling set of 2400 baud modems and the communications monster Compuserve.  Compuserve had ‘Mega Wars’ and a small library of source code that could help a programmer.  However if an indie developer wanted to use the full power of a PC it was the book store and the myriad of technical masterpieces that would enable me to turn a PC into a computing dynamo. One of the first books I purchased and still have to this day was ‘The Programmer’s PC Sourcebook’.  This book had every BIOS interrupt and all the different flavors of the interrupt.  It had thorough descriptions of the DOS interrupt architecture and how it could be accessed and in many cases used to adapt the operating system to your own design.  The book is a marvel and there were many a time that I would just sit and thumb through its pages reading it like a good fiction.  Times were simpler then, you had to understand the hardware, the underpinnings of the operating system, and the ins and outs of how it all worked together, but it was much cleaner back then.  When you programmed on the wires there was an almost reverent symbiosis between the coder and the platform.  It’s hard to describe but I miss those days.  I suppose I am a purist at heart.

Anyway, I digress.  This book, ‘The Programmer’s PC Sourcebook’, other than being one of the best technical reference manuals in print was one other thing. It was HUGE!  I don’t mean it had a lot of pages, which it did, but the size of the book is like 18″ x 14″. It wouldn’t fit on a normal book shelf; I had to leave it on my desk all the time! It was also a paperback that I used daily for years. All of that being said what does that lead to?  Eventually, the book started to fall apart. Pages would fall out, and soon it was just a stack of pages on my desk.  After awhile I lost the index to the entire book and that made using it almost impossible.  If I had to look up something I would have to thumb through the entire book and try to find the information.  After awhile I started my own index which I kept on the side for the most used sets of information.  If I had only made a copy of the index on some copying machine I could have used the book more, but I didn’t and mores the pity.

After my sad book story, I suppose you are now scratching your head wondering, how does this have anything to do with data recovery from NTFS.  Well, you can stop scratching your head because here is the explanation.

A file system, any file system, is broken up into two categories, the index, and the data.  A file system is no different than a database.  A file system is no different than a reference book and its index. You have the data, and you have an index. In the NTFS file system you have the data which is stored in clusters, and you have an index called the Master File Table (MFT).  With this being the case, what if there was a way to save the index (MFT) in case something happened to it?  ‘What could possibly happen to my index (MFT)?  You could accidentally format your hard drive; people do it all the time.  A full restore could be done from either your restore cd or from the restore partition on your DELL, or HP, or whoever else has a restore facility and wipe out your entire file system.  Bad sectors could develop in your index (MFT) and the file system can become corrupt.  A virus can destroy an entire index (MFT) in the blink of an eye.  There are other ways but I am sure you get the picture. With all of these chances of your index (MFT) being destroyed isn’t it prudent to save your index?  I should have made a copy of the index to my favorite technical manual before I lost it.  Shouldn’t there be a way to save your NTFS file system index (MFT)?  Well there is.

I have developed a piece of software that will take your index (MFT) and save it to our servers in Florida.  It is extremely easy to use and allows you to save one (1) volume index onto our servers.  In the event that you run into a catastrophic situation and lose your index, you may have a chance of recovering a large portion of your data if you have saved your index to our servers.

A word of caution.  This is NOT a backup program; this is a way to backup the index of your NTFS file system.  Just like a book, if I backup the index of a book using a copy machine, but the book is destroyed in a fire, the copied index of the book does me no good.  However, if I make a copy of the index of my book, and lose the index, I can use the backup index to look up my data.  Finally, when you save new data to your file system the MFT is updated and changed to reflect the new data on your drive.  In the same manner an index from an older version of a book will not work on a newer version of the book.  So, if you save a lot of new data to your hard drive, it would be a good idea to backup your index again.  Once again, this is not a backup program, just a way to backup your MFT.

This may not be the total answer, but it is another option in the war to keep our data safe.  The more chances you give yourself for recovering your data, the better off you will be. Remember, it is not if it will happen to you, but when…

Download MFT Save Here

For more information about MFT Save Remote Restore Point for NTFS

In the case of the MY BOOK I recommend that the customer open up the chassis that is holding the hard drive and pull the drive out of it. Now I am going to preface this with saying it is highly likely this will void your warranty with WD, but it can allow you to gain access to your data. Once you open the chassis you and have the hard drive out you can then either put it in another chassis or slave it directly into the machine. Either option will give you the answer you are looking for, which is , is the drive bad or was it just the chassis. In A LOT of cases it is just the chassis. When we buy one of these devices we are paying for the hard drive and not a lot of extra cash goes into the making of the chassis.

Now in the case of the Passport, these are laptop drives inside of little chassis so you will either need special cables to convert down the size of everything in your desktop machine or to buy a chassis that supports laptop drives. These chassis can be picked up for very reasonable pricing at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, CompUSA, Etc. Again opening the Passport will leave you not having a warranty on the device any longer. If your Western Digital external disk is making noises you my need hard drive recovery.

So I reboot the server and when it starts to come up I have a message that the array is in critical state and that one of the drives has dropped out. Now note that this is a common problem with this array, so I just figure I will go into Windows Sever 2003 and add the drive back in, no problem. WRONG, the drive can’t be added back in, so now I am sitting with an array I can’t get to and all the data I have ever had on it. (That’s right I didn’t back up) I eventually have to take it to our RAID guy Dick Correa, and have him fix it for me. He had to pull one of the drives because it was physically gone.

He then had to de-stripe them, then harvest all of my data off, and put it all on a 500 gig external for me. It was a Maxtor 200gb IDE drive, and all the others drives in the array are the same so all that I can guess is that I am just having total bad luck. That drive model is known to be pretty stable and all the other drives in the array are still in good working condition.

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.

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!

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

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!

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!

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.

Disaster Recovery Plans Test Your Backup Solution

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.

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

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!)

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!