Thursday, April 16, 2009

Data Recovery: The Importance Of Testing Disaster Recovery Plans

A saturated number of companies are relying too much on the data recovery plans that they have. They falsely think that their data recovery measures are working just fine when in fact, no one knows for sure just how they work or how they are implemented.

The issue is not about the data recovery itself. The trouble lies in the reality that no single person is tasked to take action in the event of data loss and thus no proper plan is set up to be followed through.

Testing data recovery plans is considered risky by many since it usually involves simulating complete system failure, a scenario no one wants to get too acquainted with. Loss of data as a result of a minor glitch in data recovery could very well lead to a substantial amount of data mining work.

Its really quite sad that for many businesses, disaster recovery is a measure that only garners attention after some major catastrophe, like computer viruses, terrorist attacks, or natural calamities.

The September 11 attack on the World Trade Center made a great impact on the data recovery industry. Subsequently, several large companies looked on to data mining and data recovery as a worthy investment for their money.

'Initially and quite rightly, there was a gut reaction from many organizations to take a serious look at their disaster recovery plans, but investment has now levelled off as these plans have reached a more acceptable level', Bill Pepper, head of security risk management at Computer Sciences Corporation said.

Data recovery software Veritas outlines in their recent survey that about 97 % of respondents affirmed that system outages are their biggest problem but only 72 % have recovery plans, which they never even tested.

This serious deficit in maintaining truly effective plans could expose the careers of many. A lot of company board members are already in trouble because of this failure to keep their data recovery plans in top condition.

Head of business continuity at LogicaCMG, Jeanette ONeil explained that a process has been placed at board level to ensure that the board has the legal burden of assessing companies for any data recovery risks. This process would be executed via the Turnbull Report, which also contains the Code of Conduct and Ethics on Corporate Governance.

To seal success in this venture, the people responsible made it so that the board would be committing a breach in its legal obligations if they fail in providing a detailed understanding of the risks and potential losses involved with the plans used, and miss coming up with a solution for business continuity.

And yet, despite all these measures taken and even with todays technology, no program or software for data recovery could ever be considered fool-proof. Disaster recovery boards are only there to keep data loss and damage at a minimum.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleStreet.com/

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

MS Excel Common Corruption Issues and Precautions

For the users intended for making the spreadsheets for a range of purposes, Microsoft offered an application called MS Excel. This application, which comes bundled with the Microsoft Office suit, offers pivot tables and graphing tools like features along with the usual functions of spreadsheet.


Whereas the corruption like problems have always been a menace to the users who rely on this application for the storage of valuable data. They later on realize the need of Excel recovery. However the belief of file corruption sometimes proves to be an illusion. There are few of the precautions and solutions which will let your files to keep out from the hazard of corruption:


- Sometimes the insertion of various drawings, graphics and other objects in a single file causes the corruption and sometimes makes the misapprehension of it.

- Try to avoid the chain of copying the files. Alternatively you can a boilerplate sheet and try to copy from this each time. In the else case, you can get Sheet111111111111111111 error with Excel 97 which is an indicative of file corruption.

- In the case of getting illegal operation error, try to copy the worksheets to some another new workbook in a sequence. This helps in tracking out which specific worksheet is problematic.

- If you desire to insert drawing objects, then complete this into a separate file. After this, group all of them and paste the one object into the actual file. This reduces the chances with this effect.

- For the files which are used often and by the number of users, always standardize the formatting. This is due to the reason that different cells may be lying with different formats which is the another reason of corruption.


But the hard fact is that instead of applying the line of precautions, you can't avoid the Excel file corruption. This can help in avoidance from file corruption but can't resist it. So you need to look for the means of Excel repair.


As the file corruption can be the outcome of any of the cause, the XLS repair tool must be valuable in this respect. The Excel repair software will do this part as they make the scan of the corrupted file, without having any regard to the reason. These software, which are of different brand names, run for different file versions of Excel. Thus make the choice accordingly.

Stellar Phoenix Excel Recovery software, the most trustworthy name in this respect, will help you out from all the weird situations of data loss. The Excel files mean a lot to the users and thus a little alteration can make it violable, thus this XLS repair utility has been designed read-only.


You can use this Excel repair software with Excel 97, 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007. Operable for repairing each Excel object, the software provides the easy to use interface. Just try out the free demo version of this Excel recovery software for checking the efficiency of the software. This demo version can be downloaded from Stellar's website.

Author : Simpson
http://www.articleclick.com/Article/MS-Excel-Common-Corruption-Issues-and-Precautions/1027064

An introduction to Computer Forensics

Computer Forensics is the process of investigating electronic devices or computer media for the purpose of discovering and analyzing available, deleted, or "hidden" information that may serve as useful evidence in supporting both claims and defenses of a legal matter as well as it can helpful when data have been accidentally deleted or lost due to hardware failure.

However, this is a very old technique but now it has been changed a lot because of technological advances, modern tools and software's which makes Computer Forensics much easier for Computer Forensic Experts to find & restore more evidence/data faster and with more accuracy.

Computer forensics has change the way digital evidence is gathered & used as evidence of a crime & it is done using advanced techniques and technologies. A computer forensic expert uses these techniques to discover evidence from an electronic storage device for a possible crime. The data can be from any kind of electronic device like Pen drives, discs, tapes, handhelds, PDAs, memory stick, Emails, logs, hidden or deleted files etc.

Most of us think that deleting a file or history will remove it completely from the hard disk drive. In realty, it only removes the file from the location but the actual file still remains on your computer. It is easier to track what has been done on your computer but difficult to say by whom though it is possible to alter or delete the data completely from your storage device. It depends on computer forensic expert's skills how well he can find and restore the data without any loss or change.

Computer forensics got widespread attention during the Enron scandal widely believed to be the biggest computer forensics investigation ever. Nowadays Computer Forensics & Electronic discovery is becoming a standard part of litigation of all types, especially large litigations involving corporate matters in which there are large amounts of data.

Computer forensics can be used to uncover a fraud, unauthorized use of a computer, violation of company policies, inadequate record keeping etc... by tracking e-mails, chat-history, files, tapes, sites people browse or any other form of electronic communications.
Data security is one of the biggest issues that the corporate world is facing now by publishing company's internet/policies & consequences for violations, signing of compliance documents by employees. Businesses can initiate monitoring their own computer systems to avoid legal consequences in future. Making employees aware that monitoring software and Computer forensics personnel are available could prevent workers from wrong doing.
With the use of computers in everyday life and increasing amount of hi-tech crimes, Computer forensics is a growing niche in the litigation support sector. Unlike many jobs in information technology sector, chances are that computer forensics services will not be outsourced to other country because of the confidentiality of the data business which will not allow it to travel just to save a little cash.

Author : Kevin
http://www.articleclick.com/Article/An-introduction-to-Computer-Forensics/919805

Know Why A Pen Drive Is A Necessity These Days

In the age of computers it is essential to know about the various accessories that are used in a computer. Pen drive is one such accessory which has made the carrying and transfer of files from one machine to another very easy and fast. In a `pen` you can literally carry your entire office.

Pen drive is integrated with USB (Universal Serial Bus) interface. It is a NAND (which stands for `Not and`) type of flash memory technology that excels at reading, writing and erasing data from flash memory. Their size ranges from 1 inch to 4 inches or 2.5 cm to 10 cm. They are much smaller than floppy discs and weighs less than 2 oz.

The storage capacity of a general pen drive ranges between 64 MB to 64GB. While they show a steady increase in storage and price per gigabyte, some pen drives have a capacity of one million re-writes or erase cycles with a ten year data retention capacity when connected to USB 1.1 or USB 2.0.

The major advantages of USB pen drives over other portable storage devices such as floppy discs or DVD/CD is their compact shape and size, they operate faster and can hold more data. As the pen drives are not associated with any moving parts, they operate more reliably.

In recent times, the more updated computers lack floppy disc drives while USB ports appear in every current mainstream PCs and Laptops. Most of the pen drives use the USB mass storage system which can be supported by any modern Operating System such as Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and other Unix oriented systems. Pen drives using USB ports function faster than the optical disk drives.

The pen drive contains a minute circuit board which is protected by plastic, rubberized or metal case. Such sturdy protection shields the pen drive while being carried in the pocket or key chain. The USB connector is shielded by a removable cap or it can be automatically retracted into the body of the drive. This prevents it from being damaged even when exposed.

Most of the normal pen drives use standard A - USB connection. These storage units combine a number of older technologies with low cost, low power consumption and small size possible now by the recent advancements in micro processor technology. The memory storage is based on earlier EPROM and EEPROM technologies.

Hardware designers later developed pen drives which carried their own micro processor system. These are the miniaturized version. This form of miniaturization was facilitated by the development of high speed serial data interface. In computers using pen drive, the controller system has full control over the stored information bank.

However, the actual EEPROM writing and erasing procedures are still quite similar to the earlier mode of operation. The fastest pen drive currently available use dual channel controller. The over all file transfer speed varies considerably and are measured in megabytes or megabits per second. The essential components of a pen drive are male type USB connector, USB mass storage controller, NAND flash memory chip and crystal oscillator controlling the device`s data output.

Additional components are test pins and jumpers, LED`s to indicate data transfer, write protecting switches, unpopulated space, USB connector cap or a cover and a transport aid. The USB pen drives have been integrated into other commonly carried items such as watches, pens and can even be fitted into novelty toy cars.

Their small size and affordable price makes these drives increasingly popular peripherals. Pen drives are primarily used for data transfer, secure data storage in application and software files. They are particularly popular among system and network administrators and also enjoy notable success in PC repair field as a means to transfer data recovery and anti-virus software.

Author : Roberto
http://www.articleclick.com/Article/Know-Why-A-Pen-Drive-Is-A-Necessity-These-Days/1180160

PST Unsupportive Over LAN or WAN

There are numerous reasons of PST corruption like virus attack, application malfunction etc. In this respect another reason is the unsupportive nature of the PST over LAN and WAN. If you attempt to do this then there are probable chances of PST corruption and need of PST recovery.


The PST file is only intended to be used as to maintain the copy of the e-mail messages on the local hard drive and not be used as the Enterprise network solution.


The PST file uses the file access drive method (i.e. special file access commands are used by the OS to read and write the data) for storing the messages. On the other hand in the LAN and WAN environment, network access driven method is used. In this, the OS is commanded to send and retrieve data from other systems in the network. For the remote PST, MS Outlook will try to use the file commands while the OS will use the network commands and so lots of time will be used to read or write the data. If while using on the LAN or WAN, the connection fails then this results into the corrupted PST.


Thus the trend of using the PST files over the network either on the LAN or WAN is not a recommended way to access the PST files at all. This is not the purpose for which the PST has been designed by the Microsoft.


The corruption of the PST in any case is overwhelming as the file may be the repository of some critical information in the form of the e-mails, contacts, tasks, notes, calendar and others. Fortunately, for any kind of help in which PST has undergone corruption due to any cause, PST recovery software are designed.


These are the software which holds the capability to run the powerful algorithms so as to fetch the data and thus repair Outlook PST. Offering the capability to the users to work easily via the interactive interface, these software are the well-built tools for the PST recovery for different versions of MS Outlook.


Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST Repair is the software, trustworthy in all terms and in all cases of PST corruption. The software does the safe PST repair due to its read only nature.


This repair Outlook PST software is usable with MS Outlook 98, 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007. The software can repair and restore the Outlook objects and proves as the best ever made utility.

Author : Simpson
http://www.articleclick.com/Article/PST-Unsupportive-Over-LAN-or-WAN/1033988