Identity Theft – A Growing Business
I’m sure you’ll all be pleased to know that even during these times of the credit crunch there is still one industry enjoying a growth period, unfortunately, it’s Identity Theft … the easiest way for fraudsters to blight your life and stress you still further!
Combating the risk of identity fraud should be high on everyone’s agenda but some people are still unsure what it actually is. Without putting to fine a point on it, it is literally the theft of your identity both personal and financial. An alias using your identity and financial information could literally drain your accounts and put you into debt into the bargain.
Do you know how easy it is to get a copy of your own or somebody else’s birth certificate? TOO easy!!! Do you routinely shred your bank and credit card statements after processing them?
Applying a little common sense can go a long way with a little change in your thought processes. For example the next time you receive one of those annoying “you’ve been pre approved” credit card offers, before you throw it straight in the bin ask yourself why you are happy to give the chance to a complete stranger to obtain your (all but your signature) completed form. That’s surely asking for trouble.
If you bank online and don’t consider any of the above a risk then, you still need to consider your internet usage habits. We have all been educated to not use the same passwords and serial numbers for all our accounts and transaction, but living in the real world we all struggle to remember numerous password and user combinations and tend to use the same one leaving ourselves wide open.
Un-shredded paperwork and internet activity is not the only way an unscrupulous operator will get hold of your information though. With so much information being held on computer hard drives, pen drives and mobile phones sometimes these are areas of easy pickings for the Identity thief or even random opportunist.
Accessing data on a disposed of device or hard drive for example is for the experts far easier than you would imagine if the drive is in working order (and sometimes when its not). Beware not all data recovery companies have the same ethical standards or are actual data recovery labs at all and your old data can be raided in less than 5 minutes if you have not planned correctly and used a reputable business to recover your data for you .
Did you know you can have a hard drive which you no longer require either shredded or securely wiped so that your details are no longer recoverable?? The drive can be physically shredded into little pieces even the top data recovery companies or jigsaw enthusiasts could not reassemble your data then, like wise the drive can be secure wiped and just the motor and heads used for parts by hard drive recycling companies.
To find out more about secure data wiping and hard drive disposal call or speak to your local data recovery services company. For visit here for more great computer and Pc help help.
Apple Notebook -apple Notebook
Apple has designed its new notebook
known as the Macbook Air which is dexcribed as the worlds thinnest laptop
. This 3 pound notebook is nearly thin as your index figure and has a tapered design. It has a Multi-Touch trackpad, afull size keyboard and a 13.3 inch LED backlit display. The Mackbook uses a magnetic latch for closing and also has a iSight camera.
With the help of Multi-Touch Trackpad, users can zoom in by pinching their fingers and can move a window by double tapping and moving. The New Macbook Air has a 80 Gb hard drive and can also upgrade with an optional 64 Gb solid state hard drive. The Apple Macbook Air uses Intel Core2Duo as its processor running at 1.6GHz as standard and can be upgraded to 1.8 GHz
The Macbook Air uses NVIDIA GeForce 9400M as its graphic card which brings amazing, high quality and high speed graphics to the notebook. The new notebook graphics intensive application can now run fatser as it has got a boost of 4x graphics performance. With this boost the movie and the video Playback is now richer and even the Cover Flow flips runs more smoothly.
The New Apple notebook uses 802.11n Wi-Fi for its wireless connectivity and 2.1/EDR as its Bluetooth. The Battery life of the Macbook Air is of 5hrs and users can access the web wirelessly for 4.5hrs. The built in iSight camera is integrated so smartly that users can hardly notice it’s there.
The Macbook Air is also know as the iPod of the Laptop computers . Perhaps the largest side-effect of the Air won’t be ditching optical drives, though; for the rest of Apple’s consumer base it’s now just a matter of time before other Mac laptop lines benefit from the technical and engineering advances that made this thing so thin and light.
For data recovery from Apple devices including mac notebook recovery, ipods and iPhone data recovery visit the iphone recovery website
Usb Memory Sticks – Don’t Buy A Fake
USB Flash Memory storage devices are a practical and highly portable method of storing and moving data between places. Flash Memory is highly practical for this task as it has no moving parts, supports fairly large storage and if used properly has very little chance of failing in any serious manner.
Recently though the reliability of these devices has come under a lot of scrutiny as the failure rate of what is normally very reliable technology has escalated to previously unseen levels. Data recovery companies around the world are fielding increasing number s of enquiries and have geared their operations to cope. So what is the problem here?
USB memory sticks are dropping in price all the time as with any technology as it ages and gains mass market adoption, and year on year growth in shipment of these devices has a run rate of around 100% meaning by the end of this year unit sales are expected to be in the region of a staggering 300 million.
With such large numbers of devices actually being shipped and purchased by the consumers and increase in the number of failures is in reality inevitable, however the actual level of failure is a cause of concern and is reported to be running far higher than is acceptable.
When a previously very reliable product starts to have increased failure rate, just as in any industry the repairers (in this case the data recovery companies) start to ask why and often collaborate on their findings. Investigations have started to reveal that the actual memory chips in the drives have not failed at all and are working just as expected.
The failures are normally attributed to poor manufacture quality by mushroom companies in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and China. These devices often make their way on to the market as unbranded devices, however there are huge problems with fake devices as noted by a leading and respected UK Based Data recovery company in this article:
Such devices often misidentify the actual size of the Memory Storage that they provide, they use poor quality components including cheap crystals and microcontrollers. Whilst they work fine for a short period, when they fail or the available storage room is filled, problems almost always occur, these problems often feature data loss or corruption.
The best advice that anyone can give you here is to buy branded devices if the cost is affordable (which it generally is). And also ask your self this question, is the risk of losing all my data really worth risk of saving a relatively small amount of money?
You can find more great advice on data recovery here or for general computing and IT Support advice visit the technology support website.
Firmware Issues With Seagate 7200.11 Disks
Seagate have confirmed there is a memory leak problem in the new 7200.11 series of hard drives and have already issued a firmware fix. The problem stems from a memory bug where the cache size is not reported correctly.
If you are fortunate enough to have found this out before your disk drive has failed, then get onto the Seagate website and download firmware update (if it is appropriate), or search for ‘Seagate 7200.11 firmware update’ on Google.
According to Seagate, the problem affects the following drives..
500 GB : ST3500320AS
750 GB : ST3750330AS
1000 GB : ST31000340AS
Reports on the Seagate forum indicate that there may be a similar problem with the 1.5 TB version of the drive.
If your hard disk has failed, then you will need a data recovery company, such as MjM Data Recovery Ltd in the UK who, at the time of writing, are one of only a handful of companies in the world that are able to repair the drives in order to recover the data. A link to MjM is provided above.
Other problems that have been reported with 7200.11 drives are..
1. The drive hangs during start up or;
2. The drive reports as 0 MB.
MjM Data Recovery can also recover data from all other manufacturers of hard disk and other storage equipment and are usually the first company able to recover when new problems arise.
They were also first when there were problems with the translator in Seagate SCSI drives and (according to their website) repair these drives for customers all over the world.
What Are The Problems With Vm Ware
With the increasing popularity of Virtual Machines comes an issue that many may not be aware of. This problem is an age-old issue that has affected systems from the very early days of storage. It can cause hard drive failure leading to expensive data loss scenarios necessitating data recovery professionals. This problem is, of course, fragmentation.
If you are fortunate enough to have very deep pockets then you may be using SSD’s or solid state drives. These still remain expensive and are out of the reach of most users who still have to rely (although getting much faster) on the slowest and some would say the most vulnerable technology in your computer- the hard drive. Hard drive fragmentation can cause problems with virtual machines and in some cases even data loss.
Hard disk fragmentation occurs when files are split in to multiple chunks as they are slotted into spare space on the hard drive. If you are running a solitary OS chances are you have already noticed considerable slow down in your system since purchase. Just imagine two or more OS’s running causing the same file fragmentation! Pretty soon your system could come to a grinding halt.
Fragmentation will not only slow down your computer or server but due to the excessive and unwarranted extra movement of the heads, the life of your storage device(s) can be seriously reduced. The problem is not only limited to single drives however, even if you have a very well specked raid set up, fragmentation can get so severe that the only viable option is data recovery or server rebuild.
Each operating system will have it’s own method of dealing with file fragmentation (or not as the case may be). Whilst Mac OS X will automatically defragment a file under the size of 20mb, windows pays scant regard to how badly files are fragmented. Other systems use a variety of different methods to combat the problem.
Utilizing defragmentation tools can help to alleviate the problem but often the use of some of these tools is very invasive and will render your system virtually unusable while they are running so what other options do you have.
Use automated defragmentation routines: Dependent upon your OS you can normally, either directly in the OS itself or via third party software; schedule defrags to run at times convenient to yourself.
Invest in dedicated hardware. Not the cheapest solution but for business and power user home systems probably the most sensible route. Dedicated hardware could be an additional hard drive (internal or external) a dedicated raid array or even an SSD device. The actual solution will depend on how mission critical the application actually is.
Ensuring your systems are working in tip top condition is vital to maintaining a productive IT infrastructure. For more great computing tips visit the IT support Bolton , or click here for hard drive recovery information and raid data recovery advice.
Making A Tape Dump,
When you have backed up every single night for the last 5 years, then you find that the only time you require to restore the backup, you discover the tape wont load because of a tape error.
So what can you do. There are lots software options for backup data recovery, but most of these only work on backup files, so how do you recover data from a tape?
Data Recovery Engineering Software Limited write software mainly for data recovery companies, and one of their titles is a very cost effective tape dumping tool.
The software creates an image file of the data on the tape to hard disk. Now you can access the data on the tape and recover it with your backup recovery software.
Another use for the software is when someone has created a backup set that you need to access, but it is password protected (not encrypted) and the user cant remember the password or left the company. Or a forensics examiner needs to look at the data stored on the tape but does not have access to the software used to make the tape.
Is Your Pen Drive A Data Loss Disaster Waiting To Happen
Mobile computing isn’t only restricted to laptops these days. Portability of data is increasing and it is becoming every more easier to carry around masses of data on USB memory sticks otherwise known as flash memory sticks or pen drives.
Sony patented the term “memory stick” when they came out with a new storage device for their digital cameras and digital files. Original drives were quite small but it was still cutting edge technology, but look where we are today?
Memory sticks allow Pc users to quickly and easily transfer data from one computer to another or to carry their data with them which is all well and good but one of the issues this raises is the sheer amount of data they can hold.
It is nothing to have 2,3 or even 4gb of data just sat on the memory stick dangling on the your key ring, This is more than the average hard drive was capable of holding even only 8 years ago, but every technology has a down side. Due to there portability even though they are quite robust it is quite common to damage a memory stick even to the point of losing all your data which for many is an absolute disaster.
Fortunately for the unlucky ones (which are more than you would guess) memory stick repair is a viable option so if the worse does happen it shouldn’t be the end of the world, even if your memory stick does contain all your data.
In the worse case scenario a good data recovery company can even retrieve data from a microwaved drive or even one that has be submersed,and in some cases even run over, which is a good thing when you consider the amount of data they can hold. There are of course no guarantees that USB memory stick recovery will work but the odds are good so don’t panic if you break your pen drive or memory stick as the situation may not be as bad as it first seems.
Broken Your Pen Drive? Help Is At Hand
The floppy drive has died and the Cd is going the same way as it becomes every more easier to carry around masses of data on USB memory sticks otherwise known as flash memory sticks or pen drives.
Sony patented the term “memory stick” when they came out with a new storage device for their digital cameras and digital files. Original drives were quite small but it was still cutting edge technology, but look where we are today?
It is nothing to have 2,3 or even 4gb of data just sat on the memory stick dangling on the your key ring, but every technology has a down side. Due to there portability even though they are quite robust it is quite common to damage a memory stick even to the point of losing all your data which for many is an absolute disaster.
Fortunately for the unlucky ones (which are more than you would guess) memory stick repair is a viable option so if the worse does happen it shouldn’t be the end of the world, even if your memory stick does contain all your data.
In the worse case scenario a good data recovery company can even retrieve data from a microwaved drive or even one that has be submersed, although there are no guarantees that USB memory stick recovery will work the odds are good so don’t panic if you break your pen drive or memory stick.
How To Avoid Data Loss Disasters.
One very common cause of lost data amongst computer users from all walks of life; being they home computer users, business users or even IT support technicians, is that which occurs following an issue with the machine that prevents it from booting. Data loss is often a side affect of attempts to get the machine working again.
Knowing how to deal with the potential for data loss is what separates those who have been there from those who are yet to experience it. So what kind of scenarios are we talking about here and what are we looking for?
Computer is working but simply won’t boot up properly: Often this can be overcome by starting your computer in safe mode if you know how, and going from there. But this will not always help as you may be suffering from a software issue or conflict or even possible a hardware issue such as a failing hard disk drive.
Computer starts to become slow: When we first get our new computer there is very little on it when it comes to programs and games for example, and over time the operating system due to the way it is designed becomes cluttered. Registry repair utilities can help operating system problems but data loss is always a risk. In extreme circumstances a total ODS re-install is the best option.
Virus or Malware infection: Computer viruses and other Malware applications, if not properly handled from the start, will inevitably lead to situations whereby a full reinstall is the only option to truly remove all trace of the malicious software from the system.
So we come back to how we handle a problem when it arises. How do we prevent data loss when we inevitably have to reinstall our current operating system or upgrade to a new one?
The best way to avoid data loss in the first place is to follow a simple protocol. Backup your important data on a regular basis. There is simply no good excuse for not doing this as external drives and online backup centers are readily available to all.
External hard drives can be purchased in most computer shops now days and a quick search online for online backup will also give you a number of remote back up options
So what options do you have to get your important or vital data back? If things seem really bad and saving the data is crucial, don’t take any risks and contact a data recovery specialist. They will have a whole host of solutions available to save your data and whilst it cannot be guaranteed, they do stand the best chance of success.
You can find more great advice on data recovery and in particular for businesses raid data recovery here.
Retrieve Your Lost Data With Data Recovery
We all know that computers can malfunction and valuable data can be lost in the blink of an eye. Recovery data center specialists can store your valuable information. Lost data can cost a company valuable time and money.
If the damage that has been done to the computer cannot be repaired and therefore the data cannot be recovered, then most often the information will have to be reproduced. Before this happens, backup services can be implemented that will store the information for you, in case of an emergency.
data recovery
The time to look for an offsite data recovery is before valuable data is lost. There are many recovery services available that will offer various storage systems to help you recover data. Asking simple questions can help you discern which one will work best for your company’s needs.
Find out exactly how much help they offer during an emergency. Does the service send someone to your company to restore the data or is it all done online? Find out if the restoration process can be handled by someone in your business by following simple procedures or if they will need to contact the backup service by computer or telephone for help. Find out, how often the system should be backed up.
Does their system store the information automatically or do files need to be uploaded during the day. The more ease of use and self-sufficiency of the product can go a long way when you are looking to quickly restore lost data.
data backup and recovery
Take the time to find out every aspect of the data backup and recovery center process that you are thinking of using. You will want to find out exactly how they plan on storing and helping you recover any lost data. This is a service that your company will be paying for and it is important to understand how their system works.
Research different facilities until you find one that offers what works best for your company. In the end, however, the important thing is that you have a hard drive recovery system in place to protect your data.