How to recover data from crashed Hard Drive? - The Best way

The most lifesaving solution for a crashed hard drive is data recovery and anyone who has undergone this trauma is certain that it is a very bad situation, since data that is stored on the hard disk is valuable, but unfortunately irreplaceable. The good news here is that hard disk can be recovered with or without the assistance of an expert. There are a few ways to recover your data, and knowing them can be of great help when faced with this type of a situation.

You have two options to deal with data recovery on a crashed hard drive and the first option is to go in for recovery software and this is pretty helpful only in cases when the hard disk is still readable and only a few parts are unable to access. Recovery software can be easily downloaded free of cost from resourceful and reliable websites. Bear in mind that this option will work only if the problem is minor and the hard disk can be recognized by the computer. The other side of this option is the chance to make things worse by running the software wherein all the data can be lost completely.

The second option is data recovery services. If you feel that recovery software would not be the solution for you and your data is far too valuable to take any risks, it is time to call in the recovery experts for the job. This is the most viable option since you cannot figure out where the problem lies as the hard disk is completely out of access. Data recovery services may be the best option but they also come with a hefty price tag. A word of caution to remember when using this option is to have a data recovery engineer who is an expert come over to your place and recover your hard disk.

How to choose a Good Data Recovery Service?

Data loss happens; it’s just as simple as that. The vast majority of critical business and financial documents is stored on business computers. Files and documents can be accessed much more quickly on a computer than from a file cabinet. If set up properly, those same files are accessible from anywhere in the world. The myriad of documents that used to fill rows of cabinets now lives on a single hard drive on a single computer. To be sure, all of your business eggs may reside in one digital basket.

We often pre-plan our emergency actions in preparation for fires, floods, earthquakes and other natural disasters. We take out insurance on our buildings and physical equipment to ensure that we can rebuild and start anew. However, when was the last time that emergency data recovery was a part of your pre-planning session? Honestly, you can rebuild your facility, restock your supplies and purchase all new office equipment. Even so, without your data, you have no business. It has been estimated that re-entering 20 megabytes of sales and marketing data would take almost 20 days at a cost of close to $17,000. Can your business afford to be down that long or spend that kind of cash to recover?

Natural disasters do not happen that often, right? Natural disasters actually account for only about 3 percent of all data loss. Hardware and system failures cause an estimated 44 percent; human error is responsible for an additional 32 percent. Hard drives are mechanical and they fail. People are human and they mess up. Are you prepared to recover from what constitutes 76 percent of all data loss?

Part of your disaster planning should consist of researching for and finding a reputable data recovery service. Data recovery prices vary greatly; so does the quality of service provided. File recovery is not an easy task on a physically failed drive. Even data retrieval from a logically impaired drive can have disastrous consequences if not done properly. Investigate several data recovery services to see what they offer and what kind of guarantee they have for their services. Find out if they have invested the time and money for expert training and top-notch equipment.

Find out if the service farms out their work or does it in-house. Find out what security measures they take to protect your business data. Once chosen, the service should work with you to implement a plan for emergencies. When the need arrives, they will be able to get your business back up and running in the shortest time possible.

Many services do more than just hard drive recovery. Some perform flash drive recovery and can retrieve photos from digital camera media. Some offer archival services, transferring your data from old storage technologies to the new, state-of-the-art media choices.

Oracle starts work on MySQL 5.6

The next version of MySQL will be geared toward better performance and feature enhanced replication capabilities.

With work under way to build the next version of the MySQL relational database software, Oracle is focusing much of its efforts on improving the software's performance and replication capabilities, according to an Oracle executive overseeing the software's development.

The company's developers are making notable improvements to the core InnoDB storage engine, which should make the database system more responsive. Also, the ability to replicate a database to another location, always useful for backup and disaster recovery, is being enhanced in a number of ways, said Tomas Ulin, Oracle's MySQL vice president of engineering.

Such work is being applauded in the MySQL community.

"From an engineering standpoint, Oracle is doing the best work on MySQL that's ever been done," said Baron Schwartz, chief performance architect at Percona, which sells an optimized version of the database software.

Marten Mickos, ex-CEO of MySQL AB, has also praised Oracle's efforts with MySQL. MySQL AB was purchased in 2008 by Sun Microsystems, which itself was purchased by Oracle last year.

Oracle released the last version of MySQL, version 5.5, in December. The company has not set a release date for the next version, but last month Oracle released the first preview, or development milestone, version 5.6.

Much of the work now under way is going into making the database faster, Ulin said. The InnoDB storage engine and the optimizer have both been revamped for faster performance. The optimizer, for instance, can save its algorithms for a particular query, should the administrator be pleased with the performance of that query under the optimizer.

Schwartz said that this version of MySQL implements some of the performance enhancements his company built into its own version of MySQL, called Percona Server. "This means we won't have to maintain these features any longer," Schwartz said.

One such feature being mulled for inclusion in 5.6 is the ability to "pre-warm the buffer pool cache," Schwartz said. A database can build up a cache of frequently consulted entries. When a server is shut down, however, this cache disappears, and, upon restarting, it can take several hours to build the cache back up. In the meantime, however, users may experience slower-than-normal response from the database.

"This is a big problem with servers with lots of memory," Schwartz said. Pre-warming the cache simply means the database can recreate a cache after it is rebooted. It keeps a list of all the required entries, which it can fetch quickly from the database in an orderly manner.

The company is undertaking quite a bit of work on MySQL's replication capabilities, which automatically copy databases to secondary locations.

With this release, replication is being sped up though multithreaded support. Multithreaded replication is "an absolutely killer feature," Schwartz said. When data is replicated on a backup server, the software can now spawn multiple threads on the backup server to copy the material in parallel.

In earlier versions, "you could completely overpower a replica with even a moderately powered master server. That's been a serious problem for a long time," Schwartz said.

Also on the replication front, the company has introduced time-delay replication, where the copying process can be delayed by a preset length of time, which can be handy in those cases where an administrator makes a severe mistake, such as inadvertently dropping a database table. Because the replication is not instantaneous, the administrator can fetch the replicated dropped table before it vanishes too.

Ulin said the company plans to release some more milestone beta releases before the final launch. Also, the company is releasing different preview versions of MySQL, each one implementing a potentially new feature. This approach can ease the job of testing the software before putting it into a production environment, Schwartz said. "If I wanted to test a specific feature, I can test that without worrying about the influence of other features," Schwartz said.

Overall, Schwartz is pleased by the work that Oracle is doing.

Past releases of MySQL tended to have a lot of bugs, which then later had to be patched, he said. Version 5.5, however, which was largely overseen by Oracle, was a clean release and Schwartz expects that version 5.6 will be solid as well.

Database Management Systems

A Database Management System (DBMS) is a set of computer programs that controls the creation, maintenance, and the use of a database. It allows organizations to place control of database development in the hands of database administrators (DBAs) and other specialists. A DBMS is a system software package that helps the use of integrated collection of data records and files known as databases. It allows different user application programs to easily access the same database. DBMSs may use any of a variety of database models, such as the network model or relational model. In large systems, a DBMS allows users and other software to store and retrieve data in a structured way. Instead of having to write computer programs to extract information, user can ask simple questions in a query language. Thus, many DBMS packages provide Fourth-generation programming language (4GLs) and other application development features. It helps to specify the logical organization for a database and access and use the information within a database. It provides facilities for controlling data access, enforcing data integrity, managing concurrency, and restoring the database from backups. A DBMS also provides the ability to logically present database information to users.