The last incident came to light this Sunday. The Times Online is reporting that an USB Stick was found outside a Brewers Fayre chain pub in Cannock, Staffordshire which contained confidential passwords, security software and the source code of the Government Gateway. The data on the stick could be used to access the personal details of more than 12 million individuals who registered on the system including names, addresses, national insurance numbers, credit card information or passwords.

The system had been shut down shortly after the USB stick was found (again) to protect the data of the citizens. According to government officials the system has not been breached by then. Even more pressing than the discovery of the data on the stick is the source code which could be used to exploit the system to a much larger extent.

Investigations are in full swing and should reveal additional information soon. Gordon Brown commented on the incident with the words: “It is important to recognize we cannot promise that every single item of information will always be safe because mistakes are made by human beings.”

One way to check the backups for media integrity is to use a freeware called media checker. Media checker works with all media on devices that are currently connected to the computer it is running. It can scan folders or complete drives and really supports everything that you want to check for media integrity.

I contacted the author of Media Checker because it was not clear to me how media checker performed the check and decided whether a file was corrupted or not. The author answered me this way: “Media Checker considers the data to be safe when all the files in all subfolders of a selected media or folder can be read without any error from the beginning to the end. The program list all the files and attempt to read all of them byte by byte until the end.”

A way of using media checker would be to test the backups from time to time and react immediately when one check fails. This works best if you have two or even more backups of the same data of course.

HDD Health monitors some of the important key factors of modern hard drives such as temperature, read and seek error rates and performance. If one variable reaches a critical value you are informed by HDD Health and should take counter measures. The first would be making a reliable backup of your hard drive, the second thinking about ways to fix the problematic values.

If the temperature for example is reported to be of critical value you should think of improving the air flow of your case, get hard drive coolers, add more fans or move from air cooling to water cooling. Other errors such as read write errors prove to be more complex. They could be temperature related of course but if the temperature is not critical it is an unlikely reason.

So, the main advantage you get is to receive a report before a crash or hard drive failure occurs giving you time to react and backup your data.

Everything is described in detail and easy to follow. Worth a look if you have sensible data or fear data loss.

It tries to read as much data as possible from defective media. Afterwards unreadable sectors are recovered using the previously created error correction code. The maximum error correction capacity is user-selectable.

If you create the error correction code file in time and keep it at a safe place, you have a good chance of recovering the contents of the disc from typical read errors so that you can transfer the complete data onto a new medium.

This looks a lot like the par format to me. The par format is mainly used in the Usenet. Its able to recover bad rar files and thus make a file that consists of many rar´s readable and usable again.

Useful tool, only thing you need to do is create a recovery code before some parts of the Cd or Dvd become unreadable.

Update: DVD Disaster is still in development, the latest version at the time of writing was released in October 2011. The program supports Blu-Ray discs now in addition to CD or DVD discs.

The homepage now offers additional information about the program’s inner workings. One of the issues that users may run into is that using DVD Disaster for error recovery purposes requires them to have additional storage space ready for the recovery information. The developers suggest at least 15% of additional storage, but since it is possible to select a different value this can mean more or less.

It also needs to be noted that DVD Disaster is only effective if error correction data is written before part of the disc becomes unreadable.