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USB Drives — Recovery?
pipingguy writes "Now that 'thumb drives' are so inexpensive (a 1-GB SD card with USB housing/adapter costs about $25), which programs does Slashdot recommend for system recovery? What is the need-to-have software? Additionally, I'd like to get some input on the durability of the newish card reader / adapter devices, as some of them seem to be pretty flimsy (but very useful/flexible as opposed to the old fixed-capacity NAND devices)."
My USB recovery tool is Vista WinPE
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You can get it from the WAIK :
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?F
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/27/02 9209
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http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/04/0
To start with, there are even less expensive methods than the one you mention, the first of which that comes to mind being the $10 1gig usb flash drives at microcenter.
On to the bit about recovery. You say system recovery, but use those words to link to a usb flash drive. Did you mean recovering data from said flash drive? If so, the data on those works the same way it does on a hard drive. The system deletes a file from the tree, but leaves the data intact until written over. Any standard undelete program will recover files you've simply deleted.
As for backing up your system to a flash drive, I wouldn't recommend it unless you're running a small enough footprint to fit on one. The 8gig flash drive are getting to be reasonably priced, but that's still not enough for most full system backups.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
PhotoRec is data recovery software specifically designed for recovering lost photo files on corrupted memory sticks (CompactFlash, Memory Stick, SecureDigital, SmartMedia, Microdrive, MMC, USB Memory Drives...)
DOS, Win, Linux, Mac versions available here.
I've had good luck with TestDisk when a partition has been deleted.
I was formatting a PC and installing a fresh copy of XP on it. I had backed up all my data onto my thumb drive first. However, when the option to choose the partition to install XP came up, it displayed my thumb drives 1GB partition. I had forgot I had left the thumb drive plugged in, not realizing what the partition was I deleted it (but didn't format). After realizing my mistake I used TestDisk and it recovered all my data.
The first thing I would do is build a self-contained Debian install, then you can add any tools from the Debian repositories with a simple apt-get.
For examples of how to install and configure everything check out the Howtos and Automated Installer at Feraga.com.
Its not exactly designed for thumb drives, but its saved my hide numerous times:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
Im pretty sure that if you can boot of a thumb drive, it wouldnt take too much to make this work.
I have a copy of the latest version with me at all times, in my wallet, on a mini-cdr.
All freeware tools, including a full fledged linux (Insert linux i think its called),
dozens of msdos utils, net stuff, iirc there were bios flashers in there too at some point.
If you are on a Mac, and don't mind using a larger disk for backup, nothing is better then Carbon Copy Cloner. Lost an 80 GB internal drive on my laptop once, Apple had it replaced withing 3 days, I booted from my backup disk (cloned from the original on a weekly basis), copied back, rebooted and within 30 minutes was back to where I was a couple of days before the disk blew up. No restoration activities required, no involved thinking and strategizing, just 30 minutes of unattended, unthinking effort.
There is an Ultimate BootCD for Windows which is based off of BartPE. I use it regularly and highly recommend it. It includes a good amount of tools and more can be added.
I'd also recommend INSERT. It's a Linux LiveCD that includes ntfs-3g (full read/write support), gParted, the Linux-NTFS tools (ntfsclone and ntfsresize being the most useful to me), and others. It has a GUI (fluxbox is the manager).
Recovery is Possible is also excellent and I use the PXE version heavily. My only complaint about it is that it doesn't have ntfs-3g yet. When I need that, or need to resize partitions (gParted) I use INSERT.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
This may be new to you, but technology changes rapidly. "What's the best tool right now for X" can be asked quarterly and have different answers each time, in some cases.
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