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Data Recovery - Put to the Test
Kurtis Kronk @TheTechLounge writes "Today we get a close look at perhaps the leader of this industry, ACR Data Recovery. I worked closely with Doug Roberts of ACR to find the answers to questions you might ask. Not only did I ask Doug an array of questions, I also received a sample of their Media Tools Professional 2003 to see for myself if it really works, and moreover, how well. Check out this article for the full story."
Looks more like an advertisement to me.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
If someone is willing to go to the lengths of putting a bullet in your harddrive, they might have the determination to hunt down your backups to.
This is an advertisement. ACR is allowed to prattle on endlessly about all the things they've done w/o any analysis or even details...this is Slashdot, and for an article to work it needs to have the details. This is just cheerleadering at its worst--I won't waste time and ask, "why was this posted" but instead simply cut to the chase--this article isn't worth anyone's time.
BTW - if you have *real* data recovery issues try Ontrack They can recover data from dead hard drives.
This wasn't an article, or review. I'm thinking it's 'looking for people to send me free stuff to review'-esque.
Often data recovery is used because of intentional "user" actions. Such as, say, the disgruntled IT employee who tried to erase the contents of a hard drive which contained the evidence of his (insert crime or suspicious activity here) with out using a secure wipe utility (which may very well still be recoverable by the truely professional recovery shop, I dunno).
Even so, I don't know anyone one that makes backups in less than 24 hour increments. You can do an awful lot of work inbetween last night's backup and tonight's. If your computer go to the great network in the sky (ok, bad metaphore) before the next backup, there could still be a lot of data to recover.
From the article (attributed to Mr. Roberts):
:D
Another warning sign is when a company gives a success rate. Companies do this to play off your insecurities. They know you want your data back and are telling you what you want to hear. In other words, any company that gives a success rate is lying.
Ummm... or maybe they understand that my number one criteria is success rate and they are honest, scrupulous, hard working individuals, trying to portray their market standing.
Of course I'd prefer if someone could do an independent review...
Damn I wish I had a couple grand of hard drives to destroy
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
This "story" seems to be nothing more than a thinly disguised ad for the products and services of a specific company. There's nothing of any technical interest or value here.
/. going to get story modding rights so we can remove this stuff from the front page?
Now when are readers of
John.
This was billed as an "article", which strongly implies news, or analysis of some sort. Instead, all I saw was a page full of someone asking softball questions designed to give the company rep a chance to talk about how cool his product is and how you shouldn't trust their competitors, and then a page about how to use the product itself.
No analysis, no questioning (or support) of the claims made, nothing like that. Even the very real problems the reviewer briefly mentions (can only write data to a FAT32 partition, for example) are quickly handwaved away and ignored. Indeed, if it will only write to a FAT32 partition, then how do I know it will read my ext2, ext3 or ReiserFS partition? This "review" or "news piece" sure doesn't tell me.
This is not news, and not helpful. In fact, this story doesn't seem to matter, either.
Kai MacTane: Web developer for hire in San Francisco
Seems to me like this interview is more of an advertisement. No technical details, no ethical questions, just "why are you the best?" and other such nonsense.
Nothing to see here, move along
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
How can the reviewer dump all over non-dos data recovery software without at least doing a comparison of what the alternatives were able to recover?
I've used R-Studio to recover 3 dead hard drives now, and it got absolutely everything every time.
Last time there was a physically damaged SCSI hard drive which I got _everything_ off. (It showed up as an unpartitioned drive and had tens of thousands of bad sectors).
R-Studio is idiot proof windows software which does things like let you save off an image of the entire drive to another location before you start playing.
This guy gives a glowing review to software which has a user interface from the mid-eighties and limited him to recovering 32GB.
Even then he didn't get all of his files back! How can he tell whether this is because they're gone or the software is lousy????
"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on FTP and let the rest of the world mirror it"
- Said a wise man
I hope you got a decent cut from this "sponsored by" infomercial, because you're now on my shit list along with those duping buffoons michael and Taco. Or is your share just from the ads that get served on Slashdot to everyone that's currently pointing out what a lazy, slipshod muppet you are? Hey, subscribers; did you enjoy paying to read this infomercial before anyone else did? Did that give you a warm fuzzy?
On the bright side, at least Hemos got to post this first. When michael or Taco dupes it later, Slashdot will have hit its nadir.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
When I think of the leader of the Data Recovery Industry, I think of Ontrack.... I don't know who these other guys are.
Indeed. I suggest a new catch phrase: "Journalistic Integrity - put to the test".
Er, wait, how about: "Journalistic Integrity - thrown out the window"
Please help metamoderate.
Fuck you.
Too bad the article did not talk about any difficult recovery scenario, like when part of the physical platters are destroyed. All that article talks about is how to recover deleted files or slack space.
A friend of mine told me about using "dd" and "strings" to recovers students' papers from dead floppies. It means all the formatting data is lost but it beats nothing. Makes cute girls really happy when you save their paper. I used the same approach to recover a web page my fiance was working on.
Since filesystems like storing data in continuos blocks and a large portion of peoples' valuable data is text, you recover a fair amount this way regardless of file system type.
He's full of sh.t anyway.
If you recover your data using pkzip, well say goodbye to all your long filenames...
He doesn't mention how he got pkzip to write to an NTFS drive either...
The reviewer lost all my respect at that sentence. If the review didn't already sound like an advert, calling PKZIP 'special' and providing a link to the PKWare store just flipped my mind a bit. You should be able to find PKZIP at Simtel.
Ah, well, I'm keeping my copies of PKZIP (v1.1 & v2.04e) safe on many archive CDs.