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Data Retrieval
Nowadays computer information is stored on all
sorts of media from hard disk drives to CDs to
flash cards and drives. We are taught that we
must save the data regularly to not lose the work
that we have done. We blithely assume that whenever
we save data it is exactly that - safe. unfortunately
this is a trap into which it is all too easy to
fall.
Hard drives corrupt and crash, CDroms become
unusable, flash drives sddently stop working the
information is lost.
May people do not realise that the lifetime of
a flash drive is limited and that they WILL fail.
When they do, the information is lost... or is
it?
A few months ago a student friend of mine, Julie,
was completing her final project - a piece of
work that she had laboured on for six months.
She needed to print it out on the final deadline
day and brought it to her school on a flash drive.
You know the ones, pen drive type with a 1Gb memory.
Wen it came to printing out the project the computer
returned the message - Unrecognised Format - the
worst had happened, the drive had ceased to work.
Perhaps I should point out the importance of
this piece of work to Julie. Without it she would
automatically fail a qualification she had been
studying for two years. Without the qualification
there would be no University place awaiting her
in October. It meant a delay in Julie's life of
at least 1 year and perhaps longer.
There were tears, there was hysteria. Many of
Julie's teachers tried to comfort her, but the
fact was that she had been carrying out the final
improvements to the project directly to her flash
drive - she hadn't got a final copy backed up
on her hard drive at home, and besides home was
35 km away and she hadn't got the key as she normally
arrived after her mother. It was chaos.
Then Julie remembered that I played around with
computers a little and gave me a call. "Can
you help", she said.
It just so happened that I had bought a copy
of Stellar's flash drive recovery program and
said, "I'll give it a go"
Well to cut a long story short I recoved the
file in about 5 minutes from her 'dead' flash
drive. No more tears. The print out looked great.
Project handed in on time. And when the results
came out in July, qualification achieved.
Julie is now studying at University and probably
being a lot more careful with backing up work
and not relying on flash drives!
Flash drives fail - Hard drives fail - CD roms
fail - There is NO SAFE permanent storage of information.
Stellar predicted this problem and have developed
a range of fail-safe software products that CAN
and WILL recover information trapped on a failed
storage device.
Most information loss is not a critical as Julie's,
but it is a pain in the you know what.
If you have the software to recover lost data
it saves all of the hassle and irritation of repeating
the work or resourcing the data.
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