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7 Key Tips to Choosing The Right Data Recovery Software For Your Needs

Alex De Thomson — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:18:24 +0000

The best defense against data loss, caused by damage or theft or anything else, is a solid and well-enforced backup regimen whereby you save your important documents to at least one set of reliable media. This should be your immediate goal, right after you pick the right recovery software and get your data back, of course. The following tips are in the general order with which you will approach the issue.
1. Know the lingo – Is your computer a PC or a Macintosh, or even a garage-made “Linux box”? Can you explain what you have and what happened to it? Does you hard drive refuse to boot, or is the OS (Operating System) malfunctioning? Is the problem with the hard drive, your backup CDs or DVDs, a tape drive or something else? Can you (and your employees) describe to an in-house our outside IT or computer professional what happened, on what kind of system, with what kind of software running? You may wish to write all of these tidbits down so that you don’t waste time when you do suffer an always-unforeseen data loss.
2. Consider your responsibilities – If you are responsible for an office full of computers, you may want a recovery program that can be run remotely by a network administrator. If you are in a one-person office, never mind that, but make sure you know what it is you need to recover and from where. If you do not have the original discs that your software came on, and haven’t backed it all up, you will need to recover not only documents but programs. And if you have gotten this far into things without owning your legitimate copy of your OS, now\’s the time to get it. The OS is about the most difficult thing to recover in operating condition after a bad crash.
3. Know your abilities (and others’) – If you are not computer-savvy, this will definitely affect your choices. You can choose a “dummy”-type package, but if you don’t understand even how it works, you are liable to make costly mistakes. If you have some computer smarts, you should be able to use the more sophisticated software, which will not only be more powerful but more customizable to your particular situation.
4. Know your time constraints – If you are too busy to take lunch most days, you probably don’t have a day or two to spend searching hard drives with software tools and figuring out how to recover your lost data. In this case, you may want to get a package that automates as much of the process as possible. However, you are not going to be able to just push a button and get your data back, you will have to spend some amount of time going over the search results and determining how to proceed with recovery.
5. Consider vendor costs – You will likely get at least 80% of your data back if you use a professional service, but the costs range widely. Although the aim is to get you matched up with a software utility that is in your budget and at your level of expertise, it would be irresponsible not to mention data recovery services. If you do not have the time or the expertise, or any employees who do, a paid recovery service is something you may have to consider. Be aware that simple recovery of data from drives with “bad directories” is far simpler and less costly than retrieving data from physically damaged drive platters. Know what you are getting into, and be able to explain to any outside help (paid or not) exactly what they are getting into, as well.
6. Seek a long-term solution – This means being prepared the next time that this “once in a lifetime event” occurs. Actually, some degree of hard drive failure usually happens once or twice per year to average users, but catastrophic failure is still somewhat rare, although a daily occurrence considering the millions of PCs (and Macs) in the world. The first part of the long-term solution is, of course, to back up your data daily, and if you are running a business, you should have multiple backups with at least one of them offsite.
7. Double up for the long term – There may be times when you lose data that has not yet been backed up, or are using a rented or loaned computer, so the other part of the long-term plan is to have one or two different recovery packages around. Why? For reasons that are still somewhat mysterious even to those who write these kinds of articles, one recovery package may find more files that another, but not be able to recover them as completely, or at all. It is best to cover all the bases, so read a stack of reviews, send inquiries to tech bloggers and otherwise troll the Internet for advice on which two recovery packages to buy. The price tags are usually not too high, and you should “double up” for your own security unless you are pleading poverty. Of course, you might want to consider just what all your data is worth!

Dial-A-Geek.ca provides Victoria BC Computer Service to people in their homes and businesses. Visit them online to learn more about their fully automated online data backup service.

Why use an open source archive utility like 7Zip?

Royal Solomon — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 01:13:36 +0000

Archives files are very common these days. Everybody has either opened or created an archive file mostly likely a Zip formatted file. There are many software utilities that can open and create archives choosing the best one is not easy.

There are plenty of software options when choosing which software to install and use as your primary archiving utility. They differ in features and cost. Some of them are completely free to use while others are commercial utilities that cost money per user. WinZip is an example of a commercial archive software utility that you must pay for while Zipeg ZipGenius and 7Zip are examples of free archive software.

Different archive software differ in features too. Each software supports a different set of archive file types. Some of them can only open certain archive types while others can both open and create them. For example many utilities can open and extract files form RAR archive files while WinRAR is the only software utility which can create RAR files. Unfortunately WinRAR is not free software so if you need to create RAR archives you will need to pay and buy the WinRAR software.

Another way to slice the archive software utilities market is based on close or open source. Open sources means that the software source code is available for everybody to download make changes to and recompile. Close source means that the source is not available. So why is open source a good thing? First of all open source usually means free software which is a good thing by itself. But open source also means that if you are technically savvy and know how to make changes to source code you can customize the software to your needs in any way.

Open source also means that many engineers are actively looking at the source code and are fixing bugs and thus the result is stable software. The other advantage of open source code is that if at some point the original creator of the software decides to stop supporting it there will still be a community that will support the software through its open source code or if worst comes to worst you can decide to support it yourself. This is especially important for large deployments of the software. For example if you deploy WinZip on thousands of computers and then one day WinZip decides to abandon the product you have no other choice but to migrate to another utility. While if you deployed 7Zip open source archive software and if one day its creator decided to abandon the product the product is most likely going to stay alive through the open source community or if not you can use its source code to continue supporting it yourself.

One of the best and the only open source archive software utilities is 7Zip. The software gained popularity through a large community of developers that keep fixing and adding feature to the source code. 7Zip supports a large number of archive file formats and also a unique format called 7Z which is a very efficient archive format that is in many ways better than the popular Zip.

Royal Solomon explains more on 7-zip

Is WinRAR better than WinZip?

Royal Solomon — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 01:11:29 +0000

Although WinZip is still the most popular compression utility WinRAR is gaining ground and is becoming the archive utility of choice for many users. Which one is better WinZip or WinRAR?

We are going to disappoint you by not providing any clear and definite answer. There is just no answer to which one is better as it really depends on what you are looking for in an archive software utility and which archive file type you are using more often and using as the basis for your comparison.

As their name suggests WinZip is focused on the very popular Zip archive file format while WinRAR is focused on the also very popular RAR archive file format. It is probably a true statement that if you mostly use Zip files you are better off using WinZip while if you are mostly using RAR format you are better off using WinRAR. The exception is that Zip is supported by many other software utilities other than WinZip so if you are using Zip files you have much more choice of choosing the software to use. RAR on the other hand is a closed standard and creating RAR files is only possible using the WinRAR utility. So if you use RAR files and need to create RAR files you have no other choice but to use WinRAR.

WinRAR was created by Eugene Roshal and is distributed on the market by RarLab. WinZip is distributed by WinZip Computing. Both software utilities are commercial in nature and both are not available for free use. You can download and install an evaluation version of each of those software utilities but after that evaluation period expires you have to either uninstall the software or pay for it.

Although WinRAR was developed around its proprietary RAR archive file format it also supports many other formats including the popular Zip format. If you are solely comparing WinRAR and WinZip in their ability to support different popular file formats then WinRAR is a winner. While WinZip can open and create Zip files but only open RAR files WinRAR can open and create both Zip and RAR files.

So it really boils down to the question which is better Zip or RAR archives and which one do you mostly used. Zip is an old and famous format. RAR is a newer archive format and still less popular than Zip but it is gaining ground and very fast. The reason is that the RAR archive file format has many advantages. It is very efficient compression format and in many cases performs better than Zip. It supports unicode and is especially efficient and useful when in need to handle huge archive files over multiple partial volumes.

Although WinRAR is a commercial utility and creating RAR files is not available to anyone else but the WinRAR owners opening RAR files is a commodity and any software vendor can use a freely available software library from RarLab that can open read and extract files from RAR archives.

Royal Solomon explains at winrar, rar files, rar archives

Easy ways to get any software that you need

Mollie Holman — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 01:02:51 +0000

The personal computer has changed a lot in the last decade. The combination of the personal computer and the Internet changed everything and the way we buy or get free software has changed too.

Before the Internet and broadband access were available at very low cast for everybody people had to use physical means in order to get software. To buy software you would make a purchase order with a software vendor or a distributor. The software would then be delivered in diskettes or later on a CD. The diskettes or CD would be mailed to you or you would go to a pick up location or the actual store in order to pick them up. At these days free software was hardly available. There were many reasons for that but one of them was the cost of delivery. Since it cost real money to deliver software spending it on diskettes or CDs and on the time and money needed to get them free software was not an option.

Today with broadband internet access available for low price almost anywhere electronic delivery of software is becoming more common than physical delivery via diskettes or CDs. When you buy software today the seller would have two delivery options. One which is free by simply downloading the software over the Internet while the other would cost some shipping and handling fee to receiving a CD or DVD via regular mail. Some software vendors have completely abandoned the mail delivery option and only offer software downloads. There is no doubt that over the Internet download delivery is the best option as it is fast immediate and most importantly cheap.

Over the Internet software delivery opened the door for a whole new market of free software. No longer was there a cost associated with software distribution as bandwidth cost dropped to practically zero. This enabled software vendors to offer free software to users. There are many reasons why vendors would offer such software for example to promote their brand or to up sell a higher end professional version of the same free software. No matter what the reason was the Internet enabled mass distribution of free software that was impossible before.

There are a few ways in which you can look for software on the Internet. One is by surfing directly to the software vendor website. This can easily be done if you know what you are looking who is the vendor that sells the software and what is the website. Another option is to start from your favorite search engine and search for the software surfing to many sites that provide information on it or sell it. Yet another option is to load one of many software directory sites. A software directory is a web site that catalogs thousands or more of software titles providing information on what each software title does and its pros and cons. Some software directories also provide professionally written reviews that can help in deciding which software is best for you.

Mollie Holman wrote this article. More articles and information on software titles

Open source and other free software are great but how can they be free?

Mollie Holman — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:57:07 +0000

Software is becoming a commodity. No longer do you have to pay large sums of money to install and use a sophisticated piece of software on your personal computer at home or at work. But finding high quality good software can be a challenge.

Free software comes in many forms and shapes. For many people free software is associated with what is known as open source but open source is really just one kind of free software and actually some open source based software is not free at all. Free software can simply be software that is developed by a company that is trying to make a profit by using such free software as a marketing tool. For example if a company likes to build a brand it can develop and deploy high quality software for free that will be used by many users. When users get used to the software the company can try to up sell another non free version of the software with more features.

Another reason why and how companies deploy free software is by making software free to certain users while other users have to pay for it. The most common example is the separation of home users from corporate users. The idea is simple. The software vendor assumes that home users are not likely to pay for using the software anyway so giving them software for free does not represent real lost. On the other hand corporate users do tend to pay the licenses for the software they use. If a user gets used to using a software at home there is a good chance the user would also prefer to use that software at the workplace thus the user ending up buying that software for corporate use. Two of the most known software categories that use that scheme are anti virus software and compression software utilities.

Open source is probably the most common type of free software. While starting as an ideological movement of people that believed software must be free and available to all in both source and binary format it was later on adopted by companies that turned open source into a cash generating business. The idea was that open source allowed companies to significantly cut on their development costs as a large number of developers all over the world contributed their know how and time for free to the effort of developing the software. While the software was available for free to everybody with more complex software corporate users needed to get extra services such as support in installation and ongoing maintenance. This is how the software company would make its money. Instead of selling software it would give it absolutely for free but if someone needed extra services like support and installation they would have to pay.

And lastly there is one more important reason why so much free software is developed and available these days. The Internet provided an super efficient tool for collaborating on software development. At the same time many development tools became so sophisticated that the know how needed in order to contribute to software development projects was diluted. As a result the potential number of people that can participate in such open source project sky rocketed helping make open source what it is today.

Mollie Holman explains more about many subjects on web service