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)."

Comments

WinPE

[Utopia]

My USB recovery tool is Vista WinPE

You can get it from the WAIK :
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyID=c7d4bc6d-15f3-4284-9123-679830d629f2&Displa yLang=en

Thumb Drive

[black6host]

As far as thumb drives go I'd recommend the Titanium Cruzer which comes into up to 2 gig models. I keep mine on my keychan which is outiside on my harley 365 days a year. Rain or shine, and here in Florida we get a lot of rain. I've pretty much abused it much more than I expected to and it's never failed me once. I'll leave others to comment on what to put on it but if you're loadking up a pice of crap that's what your going to have just when you need it at your clients office. Quality tools pay for themselves.

Regards,
Fleet

Re:Thumb Drive

[thc69]

Who's the jerk that modded parent Offtopic? kdawson asked "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" and parent wrote that those devices are indeed flimsy and a Titanium Cruzer has survived a rough life.

Personally, I use a cheap Memorex Traveldrive and it survives my pants pocket. I've got USBified versions of Cygwin, Opera, Firefox, Thunderbird, putty, WinSCP, VNC, etc.

However, more importantly, I keep handy a UBCD with stuff I've added (such as a mirror of the pre-microsoft www.sysinternals.com, my favorite malware removal tools, locked file deleters, install files for Firefox/Thunderbird/OpenOffice, etc). CDs are infection-resistant, work on failing or older systems where USB doesn't, are waterproof, and cost nearly nothing so I can destroy/lose/leave with client without worrying about it.

There was a recent Ask Slashdot about what to put on a CD for system recovery. I'm sure the answers there apply well to USB drives too.

Re:Thumb Drive

[tehcyder]

I keep mine on my keychan which is outiside on my harley 365 days a year. Rain or shine

Aren't you worried about your bike being stolen if you leave the keys in it all the time?

Re:Thumb Drive

[winnabago]

Additionally, how does he use the USB drive if it is always connected to the motorcycle?!

the same ones you used before...

[skiingyac]

...when you copied to CD/DVD/FTP/SMB/whatever.

why is this on the front page?

Re:the same ones you used before...

[pipingguy]

My question was based on the fact that these drives are so cheap and large now that you can actually fit a Linux distribution on it, plus a lot of other stuff for thirty bucks. Yes, I have seen the past related Slashdot stories, but the concept of swapping-out SD cards with a thumb drive-sized adapter is new to me.

Or are you claiming that technology stands still and therefore "read the FAQ, luser"?

Re:the same ones you used before...

[Lord Ender]

why is this on the front page?

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.

Re:the same ones you used before...

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

While most of the software is the same, what this adds is the potential for software that rewrites, and in general just better potential to run things straight from the usb stick. With CDs you tend to want to just copy/install to harddrive to run, which isn't always an option.

Personally, I have my usb thumbdrive plugged in the back of my router and used for storage, and am running samba on the router to share it with the network.

I havn't actually bothered to put much on it yet, but its nice to know I have the capability if I need to. Plus with 2gb for $30, how can you go wrong? If only that sale wasn't limited to 1 per customer..

How about...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/27/02 9209

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/04/00 59256

tar

[rehabdoll]

tar.

Re:tar

[DittoBox]

That's not offtopic, it's just a woefully inadequate description of what he carries on his rescue disk. From the GNU Tar man page:

"GNU tar creates and manipulates archives which are actually collections of many other files; the program provides users with an organized and systematic method for controlling a large amount of data. The name "tar" originally came from the phrase "Tape ARchive", but archives need not (and these days, typically do not) reside on tapes."

http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/i ndex.html

Re:tar

[jamesborr]

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.

System recovery?

[trmj]

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.

Re:System recovery?

[harbichidian]

...$10 1gig usb flash drives at microcenter.

This is going to turn into the first slashbuying in history, as the entire audience of slashdot grabs enough for everyone on their holiday list.

Fire wire harddisk

[Joe The Dragon]

are better when you need to restore a image to a system

photorec

[porksoda]

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.

Re:photorec

[Richard W.M. Jones]

I will second this. Photorec is excellent - it saved my bacon when my brother-in-law stuck his camera memory card into my computer and the card was accidentally formatted.

However I have seen other failure modes in memory cards where somehow the card "loses" all the sectors. Linux reports the device as being 0 bytes long. I don't know of any software which can recover from that sort of an error. Please let me know if there is some because I have one card which does just that.

Rich.

TestDesk

[Yaksha42]

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.

Re:TestDesk

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had excellent experience with Testdisk. My mom had a coworker come to her with a USB flash drive. She had plugged it into her Winbox, and a message popped up saying "This drive needs to be reformatted." She clicked yes, and BAM, all of her un-backed-up files were gone. She went to the tech support people at her place of work, and since they had better things to do, told her she was out of luck.

My mom gave the drive to me and asked if there was anything I could do. I had never had any exprience with restoring flash drives, so I was clueless on where to go. I went to gentoo-portage.com and searched for "disk" since all of my other usual methods were extinguished (even a couple of proprietary windows apps went over the drive a couple of times and couldn't find any records of files or any recognizable patterns, nor any filesystem records.)

I installed testdisk and fumbled around for an hour. I was just about to give up when I found a screen that had a list of very recognizable file names - I quickly restored that specific record of the file system, and every single file was restored without error. Testdisk also restored a bunch of random files that took up the rest of the free space on the drive, but I figured that's just the price for reformatting a flash drive. I deleted the random files, backed up the good files to cd and gave the flash drive back to my mom. I then sternly told her to tell her coworker "NEVER rely on a flash drive for secure storage. Always backup."

Bootable Flash Drive with Debian installed.

[lky]

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.

Recovery is for idiots that forgot backups

[javanree]

Why bother waisting time with recovery procedures? Do a proper backup and make a quick install CD, containing needed drivers/apps and such... I made a DVD with my favorite Linux distro, in a subdir a list of RPM's and the important config files , all the extra RPM packages needed are in a private repository online.

ubcd

[Meltir]

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.

For windows

[earnest murderer]

Xcopy alternatively xxcopy if you're nasty.

Stuff too big? Pipe it into an archiver.

Seriously, proprietary backup applications have been obfuscating and fucking up what these have been doing for years reliably for 99 percent of users.

Be a good Windows user...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and defragment your USB key periodically!

Re:Be a good Windows user...

[sowth]

Linux users don't need to defrag drives for the most part. The ext2 filesystem supports fragmentation prevention, so as long as you keep your drive less than about 95% full, you don't have to worry much about fragmented files. Any fragments will likely be huge, so they are not a problem.

barren family

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife and I are having trouble conceiving. What program does Slashdot recommend?

Distrowatch

[Almahtar]

Distrowatch is a great place to find forensics/recovery distrobutions. When I have to recover a system (be it Windows, Mac, or Linux) I've found that pretty much any Linux liveCD or USB forensics distro will do the trick. From editing/fixing partitions to recovering data from a dead OS to fixing a botched install of an OS the tools are all there.

Re:Distrowatch

[Almahtar]

Oh and on a side note they're great for anonymous use of computers that normally require you to authenticate, provided you have physical access to them. Most network admins don't think of the possibility of bootable USB volumes and thus don't disable it in BIOS. On top of that, most BIOS manufacturers don't think people need an option for disabling booting from a USB disk and don't provide it. Don't have a valid account in this lab but need to check your e-mail? Plug in your USB disk, power down the computer, boot into your USB Linux install, check your mail, and reboot back to normal operation.

USB2 external harddisk - or internal

[billstewart]

I guess there may be some older Macs that have USB1.x and Firewire, but most systems these days have USB2, and if you've got that, you might as well use it for external disks. For a USB flash stick, backing up to internal disk is probably fine, but for backing up the internal disks, there's a lot to be said for external drives on USB (or Firewire).

• External disks have a separate power supply, so if you lose the internal drive because of bad power, the external is usually still safe.
  
• External USB/FW drives have their own controllers, so if you lose the internal drives because your disk controller fried or your RAID controller scribbled the disks they're probably still safe, even if they're plugged in.
• External drives are often unplugged, so if you lose the internal data because some software scribbled the disk or a user did something really stupid, the data's probably still there. You might even get lucky and dodge a virus attack, though that's harder, and USB drives are more likely to get plugged into different machines at different times, making it easier to propagate viruses.

Re:an emergency kit should contain

[Shawn is an Asshole]

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.

Firewire drives (equal time dept.)

[solitas]

For Mac users (whose machines can boot from firewire devices) I can recommend the http://www.kanguru.com/fireflash.html.

My 4gig unit is tough as a brick: hasn't failed me once (i.e. dataloss) and it has helped resurrect machines several times.

(somewhere, sometime, I'd read that that Firewire (400) is faster than USB2 (480) because there's less 'overhead' in the data packets. can anyone verify this?)

Re:I am not the only one with a story like this:

[_tognus]

Nah, your data is fine. Windows is just really, really bad at external drives. I kick the power out of mine all the time, and this happens. Here's my fix. You can leave the drive plugged in.

1. Do this registry edit to force viewing of hidden devices. Reboot.
2. Open Device Manager.
3. Select View > Show hidden devices.

What you will have is a whole heap of devices that are faded (i.e. hidden) under the USB drop down (usually "USB Mass Storgae Device", and also under Disk drives (you should be able to recognise your drive).

1. Remove all of these hidden devices, then eject the drive and remove the other few entries. Reboot.
2. Log in. Plug your drive back in, and let it hardware detect. Check My Computer, and you should be OK!

Re:I am not the only one with a story like this:

[jim_deane]

Try removing the drive from the USB enclosure, installing it as the sole drive in a computer, and running DBAN.

I had to do that to a laptop drive that just wouldn't recognize in a USB enclosure. Once wiped and formatted, I reinstalled it into the USB enclosure, and it has worked fine ever since.

No good idea why (either the failure or the recovery!).