Data Recovery News

Here are five ways to avoid PC disasters. If you do only four of them, you’re courting danger. Security Step One is a Full Backup.

1. Back Up Your Software
2. Make an Emergency Disk
3. Defrag Your Hard Drive
4. Block the Bad Guys
5. Another Networking Fix

Learn more at Five Steps to Protecting Your System

Robin Harris
July 5th, 2007

What is the primary determinant of drive life? I’ve read the latest research and talked to insiders. There are so many variables that the best answer is just . . . luck. Why is that? Is there anything you can do?

Read this article at Disk drive life depends on… luck

From a weblog by Tom Coates

 Comments: For Mac newbies, and long-time Mac users who aren’t exactly the techie sort.

Find out how at plasticbag.org

From Indiana University, University Information Technology Services 

Comments: You’ll need a bit of know to understand everything, but if you’re gonna be using a mac for life, it’s probably good to get down to knowing.

In Mac OS X, repeated crashes in a particular application could have several possible causes, such as corrupted files or corrupted applications.

Learn the whole lot at What can I do if my application keeps crashing

By Diana Huggins, 9 Feb 2007, lockergnome.com Users often think that the best and easiest way to get rid of start up problems is to simply reinstall the operating system. However, this is time consuming especially when you have to restore data and reinstall your favorite applications. This is where Windows Vista’s Startup Repair Tool can help.

Read more at Vista’s Startup Repair Tool 

By Rick Broida

Your music, movies, and other media are no less important than your contact database and business documents, yet we often forget to include them in our backup plans. Even worse, many of us have no backup plan at all. That’s dangerous. As any seasoned computer jockey will tell you, data loss is not a question of if but when.

Read more about this at Back up your digital media

By Rick Broida, CNET.com and Jamie Bsales on 28 February 2007 

Blurb:

Are you squinting to see past the dust on your monitor? Does your keyboard hold more food crumbs than the bottom of your toaster?

Is the fan on your PC so clogged with dirt that it sounds like a plane taking off? Then maybe it’s time to clean your PC — for the sake of its health as well as yours.

Read more at cnet.com How to clean your pc

Good for those who’re handy with a can of compressed air… useful information - more people should be reading this and cleaning up.

By Valerie Henson. Article from Computerworld.

Excerpts:

Their first major result was that the real-world failure rate was much higher than manufacturers’ estimates: an average of 3% vs. the estimated 0.5% to 0.9%.

… for an individual user for whom losing his disk is a disaster, replacing the disk at the first sign of a SMART error makes eminent sense.

Read more at Computerworld:  Real-world disk failure rates offer surprises