When a disk management or partition editing utility says you should back up your data before performing this operation, it's probably not joking. There's a pretty decent chance that this application will encounter error 1562 somewhere in the midst of merging your D and E partitions, leaving you with an unformatted drive and 135 GB of corrupt and unrecoverable data. Hypothetically.
If you're like me my overconfident friend, you might be somewhat lucky and only lose non-critical data like downloaded software, ISO images, and MP3s that you also have copies of on your portable MP3 player.
Should you find yourself in this unfortunate situation, I've had some success recovering data using the FindPart and FindNTFS utilities by Svend Olaf Mikkelsen. I've used those in the past to recover an entire partition from a hard disk with a corrupted partition table. These utilities were able to list and copy "my friend's" lost 135 GB of data yesterday, but unfortunately in this case, almost all the data was corrupt. At least the filenames tell which software/ISOs need to be downloaded again.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Public Service Announcement: Back up Your Data
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2 comments:
Let's hope your friend lost personal data and not work or other business data.. :-)
I've had reasonable success with GetDataBack (http://qurlyq.com/2p). Of course, the app isn't free and it doesn't always work, but it's better than nothing ;)
[rant]
An interesting trend is developing with hard drives. As capacities increase, we store more and more data. This, in turn, makes the drives more valuable and vulnerable as time elapses. It makes almost no sense at this point to purchase that 500GB drive if you aren't going to purchase 2 500GB drives and mirror them. Of course, you still need offline back-ups to prevent you from doing other miscellaneous "stupid-things".
[/rant]
From my own previous disasters, I've come up with the following scheme for protecting my data:
-Store all "user-created" files seperately (seperate partition) from Windows. This makes it fairly easy to re-install windows at any point in time.
-RAID-0 on the data drive for minimal downtime in the event of drive failure.
-Nightly (Differential) Backups of data partition using Cobian Backup (http://qurlyq.com/2o) to an external USB drive.
-Weekly Full Backups. 2 Full backups are maintained at all times.
-Note, the external USB drive should be at least 2x the size of your main drive. This allows for retention of several Full-Backups.
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