Though their is a wave of online backup solutions available on the Internet yet their are hardly few of them that can provide customer satisfaction. Carbonite backup is one such online backup service that delivers the best possible customer satisfaction due to their hardworking and dedicated team. Online backup service is made up for those computer users who spend most of their daily life around computer and Internet. There are online backup services that offer a limited online backups for your data for free but they are no way sufficient for backing up your complete hard disk. Users can backup their drives locally on their computers but that won’t help you out when your complete hard disk crashes. Considering so many limitations the last choice left for any computer savvy user online data backup and Carbonite backup is one such service that you can trust in case of online data backup.

How Carbonite Works?

• Carbonite will install an application in your computer that runs quietly in the background. The computer user need not learn anything about this application. It regularly checks for the files that have been edited and need to be backed up. 
• When your computer goes idle then Carbonite activates and starts backing up all the necessary files that were marked for online backup. If you start using your computer then it goes to sleep mode so that your Internet connection speed isn’t decreased.
• All files are encrypted and hence only the real owner can see the files.
• Whenever you need to use the backed up files (most likely when your hard disk crashes) then you need to visit Carbonite website and within minutes you will start restoring your data.

All good services come at a price and so does the online backup service of Carbonite. You will have to pay $54.95 for a year of subscription. I guess that isn’t much when it come to saving GBs of your local data online?

Lastly, if you cannot afford such online backup services then you must optimize your hard disk for better performance and for longer life.

This one is the common problem which my friends face every now and then. They have lost there Windows Drivers CD and when they re-install Windows than they scratch there heads for drivers (I am good at saving my drivers CD ) . Later they end up installing from a already built in image of Windows (that is another story..forget it if you do not know what image of Windows is!). But using this way they have to install the settings which were present in the image CD (again another story).

To overcome such and many other problems related with installing drivers to Windows when you do not have the drivers CD here I present a solution: DriverMax.

You can use this FREE utility to backup all your drivers or choose to store some particular driver in a folder so as to later install it in the newly installed system.

After installation you will first see the window saying 30 days left to evaluate this program. Don’t worry dude, you can get a free activation key from there website so as to use the app for the rest of your life.

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Continue and you will see the first necessary screen which will mark the beginning of the ‘end of your driver problems’. Select “Export Drivers” option.

The very expected warning message will appear next which eases your heartbeat. The app will just copy your required drivers to a folder and will make no changes to your settings.

Click continue and after some processing the software will list the complete list of available drivers in your system. Select all the drivers if you want to backup your drivers or else select the particular drivers which you wish to transport to other machines.

The nifty app will ask for the folder where you wish to store all the drivers and the necessary process to backup your required drivers starts.

Done! The necessary backup process must have taken hardly few minutes and there you go all your required drivers backed up at one place.

While installing these drivers to another system choose Import drivers and give the path to the folder which contains the necessary drivers.

With these easy steps you can easily backup your drivers and to add to this you can also check for any driver updates, in case your new system where you imported the drivers does not supports the old drivers. Who knows!

[Download DriverMax Here And Invent Driver Solutions]

With the term ‘Data Center’ (DC) comes to mind an image of a highly secure room with heavy cabling, cooling and 24 hours of power supply. But in reality DC is a simple place which securely holds your data. The equipment which it needs for the job depends on the capacity of data.

I got the chance to get the feel of a real DC when I visited the DC of IITk (Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur) while undergoing my course for networking at the campus. The IITk DC servers around 6500 computers and has been doing so continuously for last 25 years without any power cuts! That visit made me feel how important a DC could be for an organization and hence pinched me to ponder into the world of data centers.

So get ready to read a really lengthy article on the challenges which an organization faces while building and maintaining a DC. Fasten your seat belts as this is going to be really lengthy and in no sense intriguing if you are not interested. [Read more]

Hard disk’s life could be considerably improved if few major points are kept in mind. In this short tutorial you will first learn how to optimize hard disk for improved performance and in the later section you will learn about the only FREE method available (atleast in my knowledge) to recover data from a dead hard disk.

OPTIMIZATION

• Defragment your drive: This is one of the oft repeated tips, yet I impose this again – and for a good reason. Defragmentation puts together in contiguous locations various chunks of individual files scattered across the disk, so that it can be accessed faster with lesser mechanical strain to the hard disk. Use the Windows defragmentation tool or a free tool like AusLogics Defragmenter.
• Use Power Saving Options: The lesser you make your hard drive work, the longer it lasts. If you are used to leaving your PC idle while you step out, enable hard disk power off under Power Management or just Hibernate your PC which will switch power your hard disk off. However, do NOT use this option if you are going to be away for just a few minutes or you frequently take such breaks, as frequent start-stops can actually reduce the drive’s life. Use it if you are going away for a couple of hours and you do not want to switch off and on your PC.
• Avoid Tilting: Avoid Tilting or otherwise moving your PC when the PC is on.Hard drives do not take too kindly to be moved around while they are working! And, if you hear a screeching noise from your PC that coincides with the hard drive activity indicator (usually the red LED), it’s time for you to backup immediately and be prepared for new hard disk.

Recovery Of Data From Dead Hard Disk

Do you hear some screeching sound from your hard disk? Does it starts spinning, stops, spins again and then stops again? Are you NOT able to recover the lost data in your dead hard disk? Then read on to know the FBI style of data recovery from your dead hard disk:

Believe me! Try keeping the disk in “freezer” (yes true!) for about 30 minutes and then do the recovery process (transferring data to working hard disk). You could also use a long cable to transfer the data while the disk is in there in freezer. If the arms are just rubbing then the low temperature may shrink everything up just enough to clear. If the arms dumped into the platters then sorry it’s gonna be hard. So instead of buying a costly data recovery software you can first give a try to this method. Remember that this method will work until the disk is cold enough. If data to be recovered is large then I guess repeating the process of recovery and cooling would do. (go, give it a try)

This proves that you do need a backup for your backup (in case the disk was a backup disk).

Lost your data? Search Google for “Data Recovery” and you would get loads of software to recover data. And I can bet that they will be promising absolute performance and must be ready to empty your pockets absolutely! The software must be free for trial use but wont give out all the features for free. And this isn’t the end to your problems. Lets get little technical . . .

When you save some data into your hard disk than it saves the data in different tracks and sectors. Like in your locality where you live. Now when you delete that data, your hard disk actually wouldn’t delete the data. It would make that “full space” available to re-write another data. And would make you feel that your data has been deleted, which is actually not the case. Now when you use some software to recover deleted data that software would make the address for that data available to your Windows. And if that was trial version, it would do the initial recovery and will ask you to buy the software. Now when you use another software for same data recovery it would do nothing as initially the memory addresses have been interrupted from initial settings.

This is where Seagate comes to the rescue with their File Recovery for Windows software. This program does the same tasks as the rest of them, which includes recovering files types such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook PSTs, databases, AutoCAD, Microsoft SQL, MPEG, AVI, MP3, and photo file formats from FAT12/16/32 and NTFS file systems. What’s the catch then? It can be downloaded for free from Seagate’s website and with it examine the hard drive in order to find out if a “successful recovery is possible”. This way, users know for sure if the information can be rescued, before actually purchasing the software.

Kevin Halladay, I.T. manager of the Sundance Ski Resort in Utah said: “I called a handful of drive recovery services and was given estimates ranging from $700 to $8,000 to restore my data with a wait of at least four days. I called Seagate Recovery Services about sending the drive in for recovery, and their client service representative suggested that Seagate’s D.I.Y. software was the ideal solution for my data loss situation. I downloaded the software and recovered all of my data, and Seagate saved me hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. The software is easy to use, very intuitive and provided a full recovery for a fraction of the cost of an in-lab solution. The product is a true bargain.”