USB Drives — Recovery? 147
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)."
WinPE (Score:5, Informative)
You can get it from the WAIK :
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?F
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Having a bootable image of Windows is nice, I don't get why they don't advertise it more. In fact, bootable images in general are great. They're what convinced me to switch to Ubuntu for my primary personal system, and allowed me to easily lobby my superiors to consider a Linux rollout in
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Thumb Drive (Score:4, Insightful)
Regards,
Fleet
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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 h
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The most sturdy of the card readers I have seen was the sony Memorystick Microvault. It was both a flash drive and a card reader. Most card readers are pretty flimsy. besides, you still can only have at most 4 GB, so why not just get a more du
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the same ones you used before... (Score:4, Insightful)
why is this on the front page?
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A good site offering information and links for a variety of USB bootable linux options if your system supports USB booting. There are a lot of sites offering complicated instructions on how to boot linux from a USB key, this one is fairly simple and painless. Once booted up you can copy off critical data unless the HDD is really dead.
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Or are you claiming that technology stands still and therefore "read the FAQ, luser"?
Re:the same ones you used before... (Score:4, Informative)
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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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 t
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I guess just anything where you'd want session/settings to stay portable rather than stick with the computer, like firefox with all your cookies staying on the drive instead of having to disable them all the time.
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How about because you can skim over the replies that are stuff you already know until you hit one where someone has gone off on a tangent that generates replies that tell you interesting stuff which you didn't know?
If you have no interest in the topic, expend your time on something else. It's not as though this one story stinks up the entire front page, unlike, say, a Jon Katz posting. :-)
How about... (Score:4, Informative)
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/04/0
tar (Score:3, Informative)
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"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_ [gnu.org]
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Even funnier is that anyone accustomed to using tar (dump, instead of tar, gets my vote) isn't in the habit of performing "system recovery" in the sense that the question was originally posed, and there is no "need-to-have-software" that isn't already available.
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Fortunately (and wisely) I backed up my drive weekly (sometimes more often) using Synchronize X! Pro which will make a bootable backup of your drive. Now, I have a external USB drive so I can't boot from it (Macs won't boot from USB apparently, but will boot from Firewaire drives) so all I did w
Re: tar (Score:2)
There's a pretty good analysis of the various tools available here [plasticsfuture.org]. The only tool it recommends highly is SuperDuper, which I've since switched to, and had good results with.
(There's another analysis here [dataexpedition.com], which has more mixed feelings.)
System recovery? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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$10 Microcenter flash drives (Score:2)
They are great sticks, USB 2.0 compatible*, and overall great if you dont mind the fact that they only work at 11mbps.
I contacted the manufacturer, which promptly responded that they would look into it, and never heard back.
In other words, dont waste your money if your time is valuable.
Fire wire harddisk (Score:3, Insightful)
USB2 external harddisk - or internal (Score:3, Insightful)
photorec (Score:5, Informative)
DOS, Win, Linux, Mac versions available here [cgsecurity.org].
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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 (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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My mom gave the drive to me and asked if there was anything I could do. I had never had any exprience with res
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As an IT worker, never assume that 'we' necessarily have 'better things to do'. Where-as it may appear that it is our own descretion to assist people with a non-business related task.
In most cases we are explicitly restricted from assisting any employee from non-business related tasks. I am not sure you meant to be derogatory with your statement - but bear in mind you may offend
"Easy to use" is really not easy at all. (Score:1)
What programmer in his right mind would do this? It does not really make things much easier to use, and often causes accidental data loss such as this. I've even seen similar issues on Linux installs--Ubuntu has a warning sticker about the default being to wipe out the hard drive. A friend accedently wiped out his second hard drive with a red hat install and his network drivers
Bootable Flash Drive with Debian installed. (Score:4, Informative)
For examples of how to install and configure everything check out the Howtos [feraga.com] and Automated Installer [feraga.com] at Feraga.com.
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What exactly leads you to the conclusion that it is not a full OS and tools install?
Granted, you may wish to add an additional tool or so... but DSL is pretty damn complete.
Cross platform (Score:2)
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The reason that most of these drives can be accessed from any OS is that they are usually formatted by the manufacturer with the FAT16 or FAT32 filing system, which is indeed accessible from almost any OS.
Equally, I could take a 250GB USB hard disk, format it with FAT32, and access the files from almost any OS just as I can a thumb drive.
Just to labour the point slightly, I could reformat one of these drives as H
FAT is not Phat (Score:2)
That's kind of beside the point, since you don't want to do a by-file copy: you're wasting a little space by allocating trailing blocks and a lot of space by not using compression. You have to use an archiver anyway, and it isn't hard to find one that will preserve all the file attributes you care about.
What's really painful about FAT is that no one file can be more tha
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I think you missed my point. I was talking about filesystem formats - the fact that most thumb drives come preformatted with FAT32 (or FAT16), which is the real reason they are cross-platform.
(Yes, of course you'd use an archiver for making archives, but I wasn't talking about that.)
Recovery is for idiots that forgot backups (Score:2, Informative)
ubcd (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ [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 (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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That will only work when copying to particular media. Backup applications go further too, in that they will make sure all the files are readable before trying to copy, showing you a graphical representation of how much data has been backed up, and so on. Not everyone likes to type on a command line interface, and not everyone knows what a command line interface is.
Programs like Leopard's Time Machine work differently again, showing you snapshots of your hard drive that were taken each day from when you fi
Hiren's BootCD (Score:2)
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Professional Data Recovery Services (Score:1)
Be a good Windows user... (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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PenGun
Do What Now ???
an emergency kit should contain (Score:1)
The Ultimate Boot CD [ultimatebootcd.com] (a bit old now, is there a better alternative usable with a USB memory stick?)
anda Linux Live CD [ubuntu.com]
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(I suggested ubuntu to get rid of that zango thing in my last post and got a -1 troll for my problems. - LOL)
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Re:an emergency kit should contain (Score:5, Informative)
I'd also recommend INSERT [inside-security.de]. 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 [freshmeat.net] 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.
barren family (Score:2, Funny)
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-UnSubscribed Baby - one without parents yet.
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The same ones we've always been using... (Score:1)
Distrowatch (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Distrowatch (Score:5, Interesting)
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I think it's a good idea to carry around a small bootable OS, but I'm not sure it's going to be as useful as you suggest. In fact, my personal experiences directly contradict what you're saying.
ANY sysadmin, even a crappy one, will have thought of this. Every motherb
Intelligent stick (Score:2)
In case you look at it and think it isn't a USB drive--it is. You can get an adapter to make it look more like a normal USB drive, but then it doesn't fit in your wallet!
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Some people have round outlines on their wallets . . . geeks have USB stick outlines on theirs. . . .
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syslinux (Score:1)
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Card Readers. (Score:1)
System recovery from USB sounds good, but I've never used it. CDs are still cheaper and easier. I can see it being the way of the future, avoiding the CD writing stage, but most machines still work better with CDs. The recovery tools for me are still Knoppix and Debian images. Apart from the recent AMD intiramfs tools problem, I have not had a system fail in years. The real future is systems that simply don't fail and need to be "recovered." Outside of system recovery, I make lots of use of flash memor
The Future is Now (Score:2)
It's the Microsoft machines that have 99% of the problems.
And most of the tools that have been mentioned here are for 'fixing' Windows machines.
Kick the Microsoft addiction, the withdrawal is worth it.
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OnTrack.com (Score:2)
This company can recovery almost anything, for a price, I suppose it depends on how important your data is. For me, a year ago my LaCie 320 GB Big Disk Extreme striped RAID array failed (one drive burned-out). Normally, if the drive was one single hard drive, it would have cost a very affordable $700-$800, however, the striped RAID array required disassembling two drives, removing the platters, reading them inside a clean-room environment, splicing back together my data, and plac
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And it appears you didn't learn your lesson, replacing your drive with another striped set.
Striped disk sets should be used when you actually need absolute speed, like working on large video/multimedia files, but even
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mm cheap backup (Score:1)
I am not the only one with a story like this: (Score:1)
An hour later my PC freezes up (as is routine) with the USB drive still mounted.
Upon reboot, the drive refuses to mount.
Many hard disk data recovery tools recovered the files BUT I have yet to find anything that will mount and wipe the drive.
As far as I know it is permanently corrupted. Which seems like it should be impossible but here I am with this piec
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From a boot. floppy, MS DOS 3.x 4.x 5.x 6.x, Win95 and Win98 could not do it. Win 98 on the drive, could not do it. Would lock up tight as a drum about 3 seconds into booting it up.
However Dr Dos, FreeDos and PC Dos could all boot just fine, even let you run fdisk. Microsoft fdisk would n
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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.
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 reco
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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!).
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Checksums (Score:1)
My drive died last week - Here's what I learned (Score:2)
normally, I use "restoration"; it's a great application to recover deleted files. It supports all MS operating systems and all MS filesystems, it's small, free and required no installation so you can run it from a floppy, which is nice. I never had any problems with it on various HDDs, USBs, SD cards and XD cards - until:
My USB thumbdrive generated the following error in windows "The drive is not formatted" - oh bugger. But after trying many different applications (and buggering the driv
Firewire drives (equal time dept.) (Score:2, Informative)
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?)
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PenGun
Do What Now ???
card mini adapters..... (Score:1)
Lame article, but some hints nonetheless (Score:2)
The quality of the card readers does not make any difference, it's the flash that stores the backup. The readers can be bought anywhere for about 10 dollars, so what's the problem?
As said, USB-drives are just another b
Acronis TrueImage - Windows + Linux ext3 (Score:2)
(1) scale: I can back up files, partitions and complete harddisks, even though half of it is Linux (limited to ext3 support, though).
(2) versioning: I can go back to previous versions of files
(3) multi-layer backup: you can also back up to a separate partition, but I didn't do that (not enough space
(3) recovery CD: it can toast a boot CD for you which allows you to boot u