gHacks technology news » data loss http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:43:02 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Another USB Stick With Important Data Lost In The UK http://www.ghacks.net/2008/11/03/another-usb-stick-with-important-data-lost-in-the-uk/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/11/03/another-usb-stick-with-important-data-lost-in-the-uk/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:55:41 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=8033 Living in the United Kingdom has one major downside which became apparent in the last years. The government likes to collect all sorts of data about their citizens but seems incapable of securing that data. Laptops, USB sticks and other data sources get lost regularly and reveal important information about British citizens to its finders.

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.”

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/11/03/another-usb-stick-with-important-data-lost-in-the-uk/feed/ 3 Check Media Integrity http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/26/check-media-integrity/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/26/check-media-integrity/#comments Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:21:28 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/26/check-media-integrity/ Nothing is more frustrating than to realize that some files of a backup are corrupted. This happens of course right at the time when you need the backup. One way to prevent this scenario from happening would be to use different locations for your backups, for example CDs, external hard drives and USB drives. Even though you store the backup in different places it is not guaranteed that the files on those devices are not corrupted. The probability that it will happen is simply reduced.

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.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/26/check-media-integrity/feed/ 0 Check your Hard Drives with HDD Health http://www.ghacks.net/2006/07/23/check-your-hard-drives-with-hdd-health/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/07/23/check-your-hard-drives-with-hdd-health/#comments Sun, 23 Jul 2006 07:55:08 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2006/07/23/check-your-hard-drives-with-hdd-health/ Hard drives are critical components in every personal computer. They store the data that you are working with and a failure or defect could lead to data loss sometimes without the possibility of recovering the data. Backups are of course a good idea but monitoring the hard drives performance is another method to check if it is likely that your hard drives might be at the end of their life cycle.

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.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2006/07/23/check-your-hard-drives-with-hdd-health/feed/ 3 Automatically back up your hard drive http://www.ghacks.net/2006/01/12/automatically-back-up-your-hard-drive/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/01/12/automatically-back-up-your-hard-drive/#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2006 10:48:48 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=278 lifehacker wrote a nice article. It only describes the procedure for windows computers, all you need is an external hard drive, a ftp server and the freeware tool Syncback.]]> It´s always a good idea to backup your hard drive(s) every now and then to prevent data loss. The guys, eh Gina, over at lifehacker wrote a nice article. It only describes the procedure for windows computers, all you need is an external hard drive, a ftp server and the freeware tool Syncback.

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

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2006/01/12/automatically-back-up-your-hard-drive/feed/ 1 Prevent data loss of Cd´s and Dvd´s http://www.ghacks.net/2005/11/09/prevent-data-loss-of-cd%c2%b4s-and-dvd%c2%b4s/ http://www.ghacks.net/2005/11/09/prevent-data-loss-of-cd%c2%b4s-and-dvd%c2%b4s/#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2005 08:50:06 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=116 Cd´s and Dvd´s have the nasty habit to become unreadable due to data loss or aging at the very moment when one needs them most. Dvdisaster creates error correction codes to compensate read errors which are not correctable in the CD/DVD drive.

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 medium contents from typical read errors and to transfer your 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 unpackable again.

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

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