We often have requests from small business customers as to which is the best backup solution when having more than one user, and also when the users are located in different geographical locations. Well Pogo Plug may be the answer to this problem. It allows you to attach and share as many storage devices as you wish and also allows users to drag and drop files, making moving files across a remote network straight forward. Therefore you could have a large central storage unit for your users to access and back up their files.
Tag Archives: Hard Drive
Apple Time Machine & iPhoto
There appears to be a quirk with Time Machine on Macs, where iPhoto library is not being backed up. So I recommend that customers check their backups to make sure that Time Machine has backed up correctly. If they find that the backup does not contain the iPhoto library, then in future you need to make sure the iPhoto application is closed before Time Machine starts.
Dataquest part of Novatech’s New Managed Services
Dataquest’s specialist data recovery services incorporated in Novatech’s bespoke IT & Telecomms hardware solutions. Novatech can now offer their customers the complete worry free IT Solution. In partnership with Novatech, Dataquest will provide their customers with 24/7 Data Recovery support.
Mac Hard Drive Quick Diagnosis Fail Guide
For Mac users who cannot get their Mac to boot, this is a quick guide to find out the level of the problem with your internal hard drive. If on start up you get to the Apple logo and beyond, then this means that your Mac can read the internal hard drive. For this to happen the drive will have carried out it’s own start up process when you pressed your mac power on button. This therefore tells you that your drive is functional to a point, but has some reading problems.
If however on start up your Mac shows a folder with a question mark, then this means that your Mac cannot read the drive at all. Therefore your drive may have a more serious problem.
More Seagate Momentus Drive Failures
We are still seeing these drives failing even after nearly 4 years. This just shows that there is no specific time stamp when these drives are going to fail. So anyone out there who still owns a original mac book with its original drive needs to make sure a regular back up is in place.
PGP vs 10.6.5 Don’t Update
PGP 10.6.5 Don't Update
Users of PGP Whole Disk Encryption for Mac are advised agains the recent system update to Snow Leopard 10.6.5. Reports of users getting stuck in a reboot loop after the update have been appearing on PGP forums. The official advice is to first decrypt, then install the update, then encrypt again. More details of this can be found on Threatpost, with links for people that have already performed the update and are now locked out of their systems.
Free Mac Antivirus
Backup
Sophos have recently announced a free version of their Antivirus software for Mac. The software has low system requirements and will find and quarantine Mac and Windows viruses, trojans and worms.
One word of caution comes from a Mac user who lost his entire Time Machine backups while using the new software. Sophos have been quick to mention that their software has been used on Macs for many years, and by hundreds of thousands of new free users without problems.
What this really shows is that if you delete files from you mac then your Time Machine volume is no longer a backup but the only live copy of the files. Either make multiple backups or leave the files on the original volume after backing them up. Also be aware when installing new software that you should have backup copies of your data in case it all goes wrong.
Update 11-11-2010:
It appears that this guy was having some problems with Time Machine before any of this happened.
FBI Decryption Failed
It was interesting to read this article recently which shows how strong current encryption technology is. The FBI and other organisations were apparently unable guess or crack the pre-boot passwords of criminal’s hard drives using a technique known as a dictionary attack. As it’s name suggests, a dictionary attack uses a combination of known words to attempt to guess the password. This is opposed to a brute force approach which would start from one series of characters and continue in a sequence to guess possible combinations.
It is worth remembering that if you are going to encrypt your hard drive that even the FBI can’t access your data if you forget the password. Also if the bootable part of your hard drive becomes unstable, it can be almost impossible to gain access to your data, even with the password. Make sure you test out your disaster recovery process on an encrypted drive, before you trust your crucial data to it. And also make backups somewhere that can be accessed quickly if required. Some large drives can take a day to decrypt even if they are fully functional.
3TB Seagate Drive
A new 3TB drive is looming on the horizon, yet this may not be the breakthrough it seems. There appears to be major problems in the way older versions of Windows handle drives above 2.1TB. Windows XP and below will be unable to make use of these drives in any meaningful way, with some reports suggesting that only 990MB of usable capacity would be available to these vintage operating systems. It sounds like one more nail in XP’s coffin. If you need this mountain of storage it seems like it’s time to ditch XP already!
LaCie 5Big RAID 6 Recovery
I will start by saying that we can, and have, recovered data from these drives. As with all RAID recovery we carry out, we never use the original controller or drives to access the data. We image the drives on an individual basis and then work on these drives to rebuild the RAID using a form of RAID emulation. The most time consuming part of this type of recovery s determining the proprietary RAID settings that the manufacturer has used.
Due to the complex nature of these NAS devices, we always recommend they are backed up to another form of media. Although recovery is possible, it can be expensive and relatively time consuming. Also if the unit is powered on and rebuilds are attempted then the recovery can be made more complicated or even impossible.
A Little Background
The LaCie 5Big NAS device contains five hard drives and allows for a number of different configurations. One of these configurations is RAID 6, which works in much the same way as RAID 5, but with an additional parity stripe. This additional parity stripe uses an algorithm which requires a relatively high processing overhead, so RAID 6 has rarely been seen in consumer level devices. The low cost of processing means that RAID 6 is now a viable option for embedded NAS devices such as the LaCie 5Big.
The advantage of RAID 6 over RAID 5 is that with 5 disks it can theoretically cope with two disk failures. This gets round an increasingly common problem with large capacity RAID 5 arrays where if a second disk fails whilst rebuilding a failed disk, there should be enough parity information to continue the rebuild successfully.
If you have a failed or broken LaCie 5Big then use the contact details on the right to contact us. Alternatively you can leave a comment here and we will get back to you.