San Antonio Data Transfer

Of course the most effective way to prevent data loss is a solid data back-up procedure.  Critical data should be backed-up at least once daily if not more, this will depend upon the frequency and rate that the critical data is updated or modified.  Hardware redundancy is essential if your data is extremely valuable or irreplaceable.  Our technicians can explain in detail all of the various ways to safeguard your data, from redundant hard drives to daily back-ups, on and off-site.  Of course we also offer simple data back-up to an external hard drive, different computer, or USB storage device.  It all comes down to how important your data is to you.  Give us a call to learn more about the various data back-up solutions and strategies that are available.

San Antonio: Data Recovery 101

Data recovery is the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. Often the data are being salvaged from storage media such as hard disk drives, storage tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID, and other electronics. Recovery may be required due to physical damage to the storage device or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system.

The most common "data recovery" issue involves an operating system (OS) failure (typically on a single-disk, single-partition, single-OS system), where the goal is to simply copy all wanted files to another disk. This can be easily accomplished with a Live CD, most of which provide a means to 1) mount the system drive, 2) mount and backup disk or media drives, and 3) move the files from the system to the backup with a file manager or optical disc authoring software. Further, such cases can be mitigated by disk partitioning and consistently moving valuable data files to a different partition from the replaceable OS system files.

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San Antonio Data Recovery: File Carving

Traditional Data Recovery

Traditional data recovery methods rely on file system structures like file tables to recover data that has been deleted. This is because most file systems do not touch the physical location of the files during a deletion, they simply mark the location as being available for storing information. After deletion, the entry of the file in the file table may still be present and the information linking the clusters to the file deleted may also still be present, and as a result, such a file can be easily recovered. Another advantage of accessing file system structures is to also be able to identify and quickly extract existing undeleted data, therefore, only the areas in the disk that are considered unallocated, need to be parsed. However, when the file system structures are not present, corrupt, or have been deliberately removed, the data while present, can not be accessed via traditional means.

File Carving

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San Antonio Data Recovery: Disk Imaging

Data recovery firms are missing out on data they could retrieve with the complete 3D Data Recovery process. Proper data recovery involves three phases: drive restoration, disk imaging, and data retrieval. But data recovery professionals can face frustrating problems when imaging a damaged disk. The drive may repeatedly stop responding in the middle of copying data. The drive may fail completely because of the stress caused by intensive read processes. Significant portions of data may be left behind in bad sectors.

These issues plague firms that use traditional disk imaging methods. Read instability makes it difficult to obtain consistent data quickly, and system software is not equipped to read bad sectors. However, these problems can be solved with imaging tools that address disk-level issues.

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