System Tuneup Guide

PC Disasters Day 6: You Lose Your Digital Photos

Digital photos and photography have spelled the demise of cameras that take film for the most part (just ask Kodak). But because digital photos are so easy to take and upload to your PC enmasse, they are also easy to accidentally misplace or delete. This has actually happened to me several times…

I’ve uploaded a camera full of precious digital photos of my family to my PC, and then deleted them off my camera’s media drive since they were loaded into Photoshop on my PC. I figured I’d be safe, but when my PC crashed after only being able to save one photo to the hard disk, I learned a painful lesson: NEVER delete the photos off your camera until you are certain copies are safely stored on your PC’s hard drive!

Fortunately you can now use an undelete utility on your camera’s media card as an easy way to recover lost or deleted photos, just like on your hard drive. The only catch here is that the photos should be recoverable as long as you haven’t written over any deleted photos on your Camera’s media card by a newer image.

There are several recommended utilities for recovering lost photos from your hard drive or media cards found on Cameras, thumb drives, etc. One good utility is called Active Undelete 5.1 (costs $40) and can be downloaded at www.active-undelete.com There are also a few free utilities like Zero Assumption Recovery: www.z-a-recovery.com. You can simply launch the program and navigate to your Camera’s media card, select ’simple scan’ and browse the deleted files. Simply select a file to undelete and click on ‘Recover’.

We have developed the habit, as mentioned above, of simply not deleting photos on our digital cameras until after we’ve uploaded and saved them on our PC’s. It only took one time losing 50+ photos of our two daughters to cement that habit firmly into our minds when dealing with digital photos. Perhaps the easiest way to transfer photos to your PC is to simply dump all of them into a central location on your hard drive, and then open up and edit/rename/manipulate them.

Make sure you protect your digital photos and other data by having backups also (we save all our photos to a DVD writable disk once every few months). Redundancy in backing up your data is the best policy, even though it is slightly inconvenient.

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PC Disasters Day 6: Optical Disk Problems

Many companies claimed early on that optical disks were virtually indestructible. But actual usage shows that they are actually quite fragile, and that you really can’t rely on them for more than 5 years, many of them will fail before that time. When your disks get scratched, it usually results in a loss of data…so make sure that you take care of them properly by storing all your optical disks in cases or places where they aren’t stacked on top of each other, but make sure each disk has its own case or protective sleeve.

Also, it is wise to purchase the highest quality disk you can afford, as the dye and foil on these disks is much better than budget disks, and will provide you with the best reliability you can get. In some cases it is worth making sure you backup valuable data to magnetic (hard drives) media as well. A tool called ISO Recorder can help you accomplish this task. Just install the program and put the disk you want to backup into the drive, and then choose “creat image from CD”. When your CD image is created you can use it in place of your actual CD if you use Daemon Tools, which allows you to create a virtual drive CD drive that you can assign to y our ISO image.

When you find yourself with a scratched or damaged CD/DVD, you will need to try and rescue the data. There are many CD repair kits that will actually try to polish out the scratches, but we recommend you try and retrieve as much data as possible off your CD first in the event the polishing actually makes things worse. You can also use cotton wool if the scratch is just an abrasion and the underlying foil isn’t damaged. You can sand out the small scratches by gently treating the scratched area in circular motions.

Remember to always have 2 backups of everything if you can, as this provides redundancy in the event of hardware or disk failures. Yes it take a bit of extra time to do this, but the thought of losing your valuable data will certainly motivate you to go to great lengths to protect it!

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Day 5: Repairing Corrupted Files:

Nothing bites worse than working on reports, data etc. in a program like Word or Excel and after diligently saving your files while you worked on them, opening them up later and seeing nothing but a confusing string of illegible rectangles in place of your valuable data! Data corruption usually seems to occur at the worst times, and it can happen even now that Microsoft has included data recovery tools with their latest versions of their programs.

Corrupted files are a pain, because you usually cannot access a backup, but have to try and repair the corruption. Corruption of data is often caused by the media used to store your data on (hard drives, floppies, optical disks, etc.). There may be a scratch on your disk or bad sectors on your hard drive when yuo save your data, resulting in a corruption.

It only takes a small amount of corruption to damage your entire file and render it useless. Many corrupt files can be recovered however, in whole are part, by using corrupted data recovery software like Ontrack Easy Recovery. It points out one of the simplest yet most effective ways to recover corrupted data and files: opening the file as a plain test document. While some formatting characters and images won’t be recovered or displayed in the plain text format, it is possible to recover sizeable amounts of text this way.

Once you open your file and copy the text, you can then paste that back into your main program (ie, Word) and then restore the formatting you had before. This might take a while if you had a large document or file initially, but at least you don’t have to start from scratch again!

Make sure after you have experienced a corrupt file that you run a full disk check (if the file that was corrupted was stored on your hard drive). This will make sure any bad sectors are marked and not used again for the storage of any future data you save.

To run a disk scan, right-click the drive icon in My Computer and then choose Properties > Tools > Check Now, and choose “Automatically Fix File-System Errors”. Also select the “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” option, and then click ok and be prepared to restart your PC for the scan to start.

Note: Another Very useful program that will fix any windows registry corruptions (which could lead to PC errors and data corruptions) is RegCure registry cleaner. Give the Free scan a try today and save yourself from suffering through any more data corruptions!

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