Karim Vaes

A whopping 40% of the used hard drives on eBay contain easily recoverable personal data. Use the following guide to ensure your personal data never makes it out into the wild.

Pretty scary words ain’t it… but it’s not far from the truth! Read the article to tutor yourself about the matter as you probably don’t want anyone to invade your privacy.

The first step in securing your data is bolstering your understanding of how data is stored and what happens when you delete it. Many people operate under the impression that when they delete a file it’s gone, as though they had torn a page from a book. But the way most operating systems handle such events is by simply removing the little marker that points to the file. That’s more like having information written on a chalk board in columns, each column labeled with a header, and then simply erasing that header to signify that column is “deleted” and available for future writing over. Anyone who looks at the board can read everything written in the column, until someone starts writing over it.

Disk Investigator is a pretty unique hard drive data retrieval tool that takes a totally different approach than the usual hard drive data recovery tools. What Disk Investigator does is to provide direct access to the raw data sectors of a selected hard drive so that the hard drive’s data can be explored up to the last bit.

More info? Check out ghacks!

Check out an article at Lifehacker: “How to recover deleted files with free software”

Ack! The computer ate my term paper! We’ve all been there at some point. You delete an important file, somehow it skips your Recycle Bin altogether, and for all practical purposes, it’s disappeared into the ether. But before you hit the big red panic button, there’s a very good chance that your file is still alive and kicking somewhere on your hard drive—you just need to know how to find it. With the right tools, finding and recovering that deleted file can be as simple as a few clicks of your mouse.

Check out the following article at gizmodo.com! It’s a nice rundown on how harddrives actually work.

The basics
RAID combines two or more physical hard disks into a single logical unit by using either special hardware or software. Hardware solutions often are designed to present themselves to the attached system as a single hard drive, and the operating system is unaware of the technical workings. Software solutions are typically implemented in the operating system, and again would present the RAID drive as a single drive to applications.

There are three key concepts in RAID: mirroring, the copying of data to more than one disk; striping, the splitting of data across more than one disk; and error correction, where redundant data is stored to allow problems to be detected and possibly fixed (known as fault tolerance). Different RAID levels use one or more of these techniques, depending on the system requirements. The main aims of using RAID are to improve reliability, important for protecting information that is critical to a business, for example a database of customer orders; or to improve speed, for example a system that delivers video on demand TV programs to many viewers.

The configuration affects reliability and performance in different ways. The problem with using more disks is that it is more likely that one will go wrong, but by using error checking the total system can be made more reliable by being able to survive and repair the failure. Basic mirroring can speed up reading data as a system can read different data from both the disks, but it may be slow for writing if the configuration requires that both disks must confirm that the data is correctly written. Striping is often used for performance, where it allows sequences of data to be read from multiple disks at the same time. Error checking typically will slow the system down as data needs to be read from several places and compared. The design of RAID systems is therefore a compromise and understanding the requirements of a system is important. Modern disk arrays typically provide the facility to select the appropriate RAID configuration. PC Format Magazine claims that “in all our real-world tests, the difference between the single drive performance and the dual-drive RAID 0 striped setup was virtually non-existent. And in fact, the single drive was ever-so-slightly faster than the other setups, including the RAID 5 system that we’d hoped would offer the perfect combination of performance and data redundancy”.

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