Irfan's Corner on the Web » backup http://irfanhabib.com/blog On Mac, Linux, Grid, Virtualization and Software Technology Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:59:00 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 How to recover data from an formatted HFS Drive http://irfanhabib.com/blog/2010/01/14/how-to-recover-data-from-an-formatted-hfs-drive/ http://irfanhabib.com/blog/2010/01/14/how-to-recover-data-from-an-formatted-hfs-drive/#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:42:26 +0000 admin http://irfanhabib.com/blog/2010/01/14/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).

]]> http://irfanhabib.com/blog/2010/01/14/how-to-recover-data-from-an-formatted-hfs-drive/feed/ 2 Making the move to Cloud backup http://irfanhabib.com/blog/2009/12/30/making-the-move-to-cloud-backup/ http://irfanhabib.com/blog/2009/12/30/making-the-move-to-cloud-backup/#comments Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:49:06 +0000 admin http://irfanhabib.com/blog/2009/12/30/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.

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