[ELECTRON] data recovery req!

[Martin McGrath]

In addition to what's been said on and off list I think this raises an
important issue which I've had to point out a few times when similar things
have gone wrong for other people.

A backup stored in the same place (house, flat, office..) isn't a backup
policy. You just have another copy of your data.
For example, if someone who did such a thing found their house/flat/office
had burned down they'd be lucky to get any data back**.

For important stuff I keep off site backups. Blank DVD media is cheap as
chips these days. I regularly create encrypted archives of data, burn them
to DVDs, leave one set locked in a drawer at work, another set with a
friend. I also use the https://one.ubuntu.com/ basic service to seamlessly
archive some files on their storage cloud. N.B. other free and paid for
services are available. These files do get included in the periodic DVD
backups I make.

** special (costly) fireproof/heavy duty external hard drives exist, most
people don't own them.

Testing backups. It's important to test that you can restore your data from
the backups you make, otherwise the exercise is a waste of time.

Cheers

Martin

On 9 April 2011 11:08, kisho khwa <meandmyrobotfriend at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> Thanks Kenny/ Kelsoo & Martin,
>
> The drive doesnae show up at all and I think something is damaged inside.
> Like everyone has said, I think connecting it to the power source will just
> cause more damage as the disc starts up. Oooof, I suppose the only solution
> is to wait & save more cash and take it to a company  :-(
>
> n
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Kenny Duffus <kenny at duffus.org>
> *To:* Discussion list for the Electron Club <members at electronclub.org>
> *Sent:* Sat, 9 April, 2011 10:51:27
> *Subject:* Re: [ELECTRON] data recovery req!
>
> On Saturday 09 April 2011 10:29:32 kelsoo wrote:
> > kisho khwa wrote:
> > > Hi folks,
> > >
> > > I have a wee offer for someone out there......
> > >
> > > One of DD's ext HD's had an accident and now doesnae work <chuggs/
> > > bleeps/ nothing> and it was the one we backed up *everything* onto
> > > <was just about to make a copy!>. Anyhoo, is there anyone on/off the
> > > list who would be able to recover the data off it - I think it's about
> > > 650GB worth on it - there would be some cash in it for you.....We
> > > can't really afford any of the companies we've looked at so far....
> > >
> >
> > Try test disk It's "free software"  as in freedom under the gpl. I've
> > used it in the past on so called dead disks and it's only failed on one.
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk
> >
> > http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
> >
>
> what you can do depends a lot on why the disk isn't working
>
> if the disk is physically not spinning up/reading heads failure that is a
> lot
> more complicated and not something you can solve with testdisk or similar
> software
>
> testdisk etc will only work if the disk still works but the filesystems is
> corrupted or has unreadable sections of the disk (bad blocks)
>
> if you can read any data off the disk the first and most important task is
> to
> try to make a complete copy of the disk using something like dd, then you
> can
> play with testdisk on a copy of the dd image
>
> --
>
>     Kenny
>
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