We had a job in the Lab last week were a family had just returned from holiday, only to find their camera (which had been loaded into cargo) had been damaged on the flight home. I’m happy to say we were able to recover the holiday photo, but it got me think now could this have been prevented. Copy them onto the computer seemed like the easy answer. But if your anything like me, I go on holiday to get away from my computer. Then I came across the “HyperDrive ColorSpace”
The Hyperdrive ColorSPACE (UDMA) is backup solution for your Digital Camera when you’re on the go. It supports 14 different memory card formats, including CompactFlash, SD and MemoryStick. Unlimited SATA HDD capacity (120~500GB & beyond), and with a High-resolution 3.2″ color LCD. It has to be the coolest and most advanced photo backup solution I have come across. Did I also mention it is compatible with the Apple iPad.
Operation couldn’t be simpler. Put a card in its appropriate slot and press the Backup button. The contents of the memory card are copied (with CRC data verification) and the copying process is displayed onscreen along with thumbnails of the images as they are being copied. Incremental backup is also supported. Which means only new data on the card is backed up, skip previously saved data.
Tags: HyperDrive Colorspace, iPad, Photos Backup
Sadly the phrase “Backup” is still a bit of an anomaly to some people. And while disaster is a great motivator, it doesn’t have to be. With technologies like Time Capsule and Time Machine, the daunting task of back up has been replaced by automatic and constant protection. And because the Time Capsule is a wireless device, it can all be done without being tethered to hard Drive. In turn saving everything important, including your sanity. Even if you have multiple Mac computers in your house, Time Capsule can back up and store files for each of Apple Computers.
Just set Time Capsule as the designated backup drive for Time Machine, and that’s it. Depending on how much data you have, your initial backup with Time Capsule could take overnight or longer. After it completes, only changed files are backed up, and in the background. So you never have to worry about backing up again.
Time Capsule - Backup solutions for SOHO businesses
Recently a friend of mine called me almost in tears. Her youngest daughter had been looking photos on the camera and when a message came up on screen after pressing some buttons she decided to press some more. This resulted in formatting the SD card and losing all the photos.
I told her to bring it in and make sure she didn’t take any more photos on it. Aside from the area of the card she had already taken a couple of new photos we were able to get back pretty much everything she had lost.
With so much data flowing around in our personal lives we shouldn’t feel technically restricted by not understanding how easy it is to upgrade the hard drive in our computer.
With many families now having literally thousands of photos, music and home movies the standard hard drive that comes installed in our computers often becomes too small for our needs.
It’s easy to install an internal hard drive in your computer and we found this video on the Western Digital website to help you upgrade your own hard drive.
Being both Geeks and Dads the team at Recover my Files know how valuable photos are and what part they play in our life. We have spent a considerable amount of time trying different online photo storage solutions to find the best, not just for ourselves but for you as well. SmugMug won hands down for its value, feature rich applications, ease of use and quality of photo storage. SmugMug is not free… but there are no storage limits and they don’t reduce the resolution of your photos.
Unlimited storage.
No 200 photo limits, because storage at SmugMug is unlimited. So is traffic. Become a rock star and invite millions to view your amazing self. Use us as safe backup and retrieve your photos anytime.
Gorgeous online albums.
Your friends and family will tell you how great your photos look here. They fit your display area perfectly from iPhones to 40″ plasma TV’s.
SmugMug on your iPhone.
Shoot, geotag, upload in one shot. The SmugMug iPhone app is a great addition allowing you to shoot save & share straight from your iPhone.
SmugMug in your apps.
Add photos directly from Picasa, Photoshop, Lightroom, iPhoto, Aperture and many others.
Silky-smooth slideshows.
Flash slideshows can be made any size, up to full screen even on huge monitors. Embed them in blogs, forums and web pages.
Your photos on Google Maps.
If you or your camera knows where your photos were taken, SmugMug can display them on Google maps for you.
Few computer problems cause more heartaches than a failed or failing hard drive. Other computer components cost lost time, a few bucks and a bit of inconvienence.
But when your Harddrive dies you’re not only looking at a bit of lost time, but lost data, like family photos, business documents, home videos, music, and huge amounts of your electronic life.
Fortunately, hard drives rarely conk out without any warning, giving you both a chance to detect impending failure, and to extract any important data that might not already be backed up or at least to get it in to a data recovery specialist like Recover my Files while it is still in a recoverable state.
Warning Signs
If your hard drive recently began making grinding, clicking, or other noises that it didn’t used to make, then there’s something wrong. These symptoms represent mechanical or physical defects, and while it’s possible the drive may continue to work indefinitely, the more likely scenario is it will stop working very soon and you will probably lose data.
A more subtle sign comes in the form of file errors, and you may receive warnings from Windows that you need to run the check disk utility. If after doing so you continue to meet head on with more errors, your hard drive may suffer from bad sectors. You might experience blue screens or slow downs or simply weird things happening on your computer.
Other signs include unusually slow access times, incomprehensible files names, crashes, and other undesireable behavior. If you’re experiencing any of these, or the ones previously pointed out, backup your data immediately and then begin the diagnostic process.
We use DropBox at Recover my Files for both our callaborative purposes as well as online backup and version control because it is simply an awesome app that just works well.
First of all there is ??Sync, DropBox allows you to sync your files online and across your computers and mobile devices like iPhone and iPad automatically. This is the “it just works” part. Once setup there is nothing to do becasue it is so robust that it just works.
When syncing accross local computers on a network DropBox tries to sync the latest version accross the other computers using the local version and your own lan rather than a continuous data stream from dropbox to each computer. This feature is called LanSync.
You can get a whopping 2GB of online storage for free, with up to 100GB available to paying customers.Once setup you can Sync files of any size or type using Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. This sync is realtime because DropBox automatically syncs when new files or changes are detected. We often use drop box instead of email for sharing files with others. “Hey let me drop it into your dropbox folder”
Then there is File Sharing, Sharing files is simple. It takes only a few clicks.
Shared folders allow several people to collaborate on the same files. You can either use your global “Public” folder to link directly to files or control who has access to specific shared folders. Kick people out and remove the shared files from their computers in the process and automatically create shareable online photo galleries out of regular folders.
So essentially this outlines a robust backup app because not only are you syncing to the cloud but also to other computers and with the ability to undelete files and folders as well as 30 days of version control history per file DropBox is an awesome backup solution with practical application.
Tags: DropBox, Online Backup
The ultimate portable hard drive backed by the ultimate warranty
Data has become increasing mobile, but with that increased mobility comes increased risk. Delicate portable storage devices can easily be dropped during travel, stolen or exposed to adverse environmental conditions such as extreme temperatures, sand or moisture — all factors which can lead to data loss.
The Rugged Portable from ioSafe addresses each of these problems. It’s tough enough to be used in arctic or desert environments, is shock and crush resistant, has anti-theft features and is backed by ioSafe’s unique Data Recovery Service and No-Hassle Warranty. This means that if your Rugged Portable stops working for any reason at all during the warranty period, they’ll repair or replace the drive and recover the data from your old drive.
It’s Crush resistant with it’s Full Metal Jacket technology and titanium alloy enclosure.
The Hydrosafe technology means it can sit in water to a depth of up to 10′ (aluminium) or 30′ (titanium alloy version) for up to 3 days and still protect data.
It can be dropped from a height of up to 20′ and can survive altitudes of up to 30,000′ which is great if you drop it out of your pack while mountain climbing.
Add to that a blazing fast USB 3.0 with a Firewire 800 being released later this year the ioSafe is a pretty impressive external hard drive.
Chekc out the full specs of the ioSafe Hard Drive here ????https://iosafe.com/products-rugged-portable-features
Tags: Hard Drive, ioSafe, Rugged Drives
Today’s $95 1TB drive would have cost $1 trillion in the 1950s
Editor’s Note: This story is excerpted from Computerworld
Hard disk drives sure have come a long way, baby.
Hard Drives have come a long way
In the 1950s, storage hardware was measured in feet—and in tons. Back then, the era’s state-of-the-art computer drive was found in IBM’s RAMAC 305; it consisted of two refrigerator-size boxes that weighed about a ton each. One box held 40 24-inch dual-sided magnetic disk platters; a carriage with two recording heads suspended by compressed air moved up and down the stack to access the disks. The other cabinet contained the data processing unit, the magnetic process drum, magnetic core register and electronic logical and arithmetic circuits.
Today, we have flash drives, microdrives, and onboard solid-state drives that weigh almost nothing, hold gigabytes of data and cost (compared to the 1950s) very little. How cheap is storage now? A 1TB hard drive that sells for as little as $60 today would have been worth $1 trillion in the 1950s, when computer storage cost $1 per byte, according to Dag Spicer, senior curator of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
A modern-day 4GB stick of RAM would have cost $32 billion.
Imagine, you finish your portfolio work for credits towards NCEA. You have it all safe on the USB and are heading in to School to hand it in. You arrive, insert the Flash stick and the Drive says “Unrecognised Drive – Would you like to Format?”. Yeah your worst nightmare. What do you do next.
Well you phone a friend who says take it to the computer shop. The computer shop looks at it and says “no we can’t help” but we can send it to our data recover partner, Recover My Files. But its urgent. No problem, we will send it overnight courier, I’ve spoken to the Recover My Files guys and they will do it urgently first thing in the morning. 8:00am the next day the courier dropped it off, 30 minutes later we had a recovery and 15 minutes after that the Computer Shop tech had FTP’ed it from our server back to his machine (from Hamilton to the South Island in about 6 minutes). The Tech copied it to a new USB drive and the student submitted it, all within 16 hours, 12 of which were being transported (overnight).
And to top it off we charged only $99 and gave them a student discount (we have all been students once so know what it’s like).
Tags: data recovery
Lost your photos from your camera or drive? Our specialist Photo Recovery team works with the latest technologies not found in any other Data Recovery Lab in NZ. 
We understand this technology very well and if we could offer one piece of advice it would be "If you suspect data loss, do not use the drive at all as the more it is used the harder it is to retrieve data"