backup « Irfan’s Corner on the Web

14Jan/102

How to recover data from an formatted HFS Drive

Last week my Time Machine Backup Hard disk suddenly died! Everytime I plugged the hard disk, my mac did not recognise the file system (it was a HFS+ partition) and asked my to format it. I did format it, only to realise that I had lost some precious data.

How do you recover data from a formatted hard disk? Enter Data Rescue from PROSoft Engineering. I used Data Rescue II (only to realise afterwards that a new version was available). It took more than 2 days to scan the hard disk (1 TB hard disk, sector by sector analysis) and afterwards it recreated the files it found.

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Recreation of the files, was also a lengthy process, and took nearly 10 hrs. After it recovers the files it presents a list of the kinds of files you might be interested in restoring. I selected the files I was interested in, research papers and my iPhoto Collection.

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Recovery of the selected files (around 55.6GB) took around 3 hrs.

All in all I'm really grateful for such fantastic software. For all the windows users out there.... My NTFS hard disk has failed as well (bad start to the year! ). Currently I'm using ParetoLogic's Data Recovery Pro. The data recovery process is currently on going (since 5 days).

Tagged as: backup 2 Comments

30Dec/090

Making the move to Cloud backup

My Time Machine Hard disk failed 2 days ago. I lost all my backups! Unfortunately I had reinstalled my system just last week and had not yet fully restored from the latest time machine backup. Fortunately I have recovered everything other than my pictures.

I don't want to experience such loss again, so I'm moving towards Cloud based backup. I gain a few things, but loose some as well. The service I selected is Mozy. They provide unlimited storage at an economical rate. However their backup/restore tool for the Mac does not support Proxies (their windows one apparently does). Moreover, Mozy's tool also does not allow me to browse my backups in a fine-grained fashion as Time Machine does. In Time Machine I can restore individual folders and files and browse my backup history over weeks and months. The Mozy tool does not provide such fine-grained history browsing.

Finally, uploading is such a hassle! It took me more than a day to upload a limited subset of data from my laptop (~60GB). Downloading fortunately is faster.

What do I gain from a cloud based backup solution? Hopefully I will not loose my data again.

However because there are certain advantages to local backups as well, I plan to do daily Time machine backups, on a new 1TB HD and weekly cloud backups. As for my pictures, I have a MobileMe subscription and those albums I shared there with friends and family I still have them. So in future I plan to upload all my new pictures to MobileMe.