Beware of Freebies

[Stinky]

My ISP offers free virus protection. I paid nothing for it and that's what it's worth. The trouble was to install it, it required me to remove McAfee. Since that was coming up for annual renewal, I complied. Since then, I just had my second exciting experience of totally rebuilding from fdisk. This time I paid for and will keep current Norton Internet Security. Any suggestions for the best backup to CD/DVD program? My Retrospect disks failed me.
Now I get to rebuild my lost tax data - no fun . Reloading my favorite AW content will actually be fun . I had been thinking I should thin it out. Anyone know a crack that will let me download from my iPod. I took forever to load all my music onto it. I can reload it, but it would be sweet not to have to.

[yusanord]

I don't know if you already have tried PC Inspector file recovery or similar program, but it could be some help.

yusa

[arsby]

I've had good experience with good ol' MS backup, that's shipped with Windows.
Had a catastrophic crash in the morning, was up and running that afternoon.
The only gotcha is that on the new system the MS restore is not installed by default, it's a custom install option.
I bought a USB hard drive that's as big as my PC hard drive, and back up everything.

BTW, I've had McAfee for years and haven't had any infections so bad I had to fdisk.

[Frans]

My ISP offers free virus protection. I paid nothing for it and that's what it's worth. The trouble was to install it, it required me to remove McAfee.

Which product did the ISP supply ? Would be helpfull to know what to avoid. My ISP provides McAfee for example (I use nod32 since I think McAfee slows down my system way to much)

Since that was coming up for annual renewal, I complied. Since then, I just had my second exciting experience of totally rebuilding from fdisk.

Why rebuild? If a the partition table or MBR is destroyed often most data can be recovered. OnTrack's Easy Recovery should handle that nicely, or GetDataBack or if it gets really bad R-Studio. All fdisk does is make a new master index table on the disk, if that is all you've lost you can still access the information on the disk. You just need scan the entire disk, which takes a LOT of time and rebuild the index.

This time I paid for and will keep current Norton Internet Security. Any suggestions for the best backup to CD/DVD program? My Retrospect disks failed me.

Oh?? Retrospect is a fairly high-end product, it should have worked. I recommend either the build-in Microsoft backup or it's more expanded version which is marketed as "Sonic Backup My Pc". The reason is that both those programs can make backups of files which are in use ('snapshot'), usually such an option is an expensive add-on.

Anyone know a crack that will let me download from my iPod. I took forever to load all my music onto it. I can reload it, but it would be sweet not to have to.

Try HOW-TO: Get music OFF your iPod, I don't own an iPod so I don't know if it will work ephPod would seem to do what you need.

-Frans

[Stinky]

The product was Earthlink's Protection Center.

I rebuilt the first time becauser a virus had somehow disabled the ability to write to removable media and Installing from the XP install disk with the r (repair) option changed nothing. The second time, a virus corrupted some files in the system32 directory such that the XP install disk would go blue screen of death whether I chose the r option or straight install. I thought I had a hardware problem. Now I think the repair shop may have been able to recover most data at some labor cost, but they recommended wiping it.

Don't know what went wrong with Retrospect, I bought it because Windows backup wouldn't span multiple CDs I will give Windows backup another look now.

The iPod link worked. My tunes are all back.

Thanks all for the feedback, especially Frans for the iPod crack, I am going to try it now. Too bad I didn't have a second PC to go online for your help when I had the problem.

The iPod link worked. All my music is back!

[greycat]

haven't had to rebuild, but for reasons never clear a lot of graphics files went missing a while back, I got most back with PC Tools File Recovery, I think I would have gotten them all back but didn't realize the problem for a day or so and any file that by chance was written over even partly by other write operations was not recoverable, those not written over were recoverable. I got a Western Digital portable hard drive (Seagate makes very similar product, ebay had the WD cheaper, about $130US for 120Gb, runs entirely off the USB 2.0 port as well as connecting through it, it is bigger in capacity than my hard drive, I just copy to it periodically). the drive is about 3-1/2 inches by 5 inches by 3/4 inch, plus only a cable. no power block. it was about the price of a DVD write drive, the hard drive solution seemed better, so far works fine. on the other hand, if a virus had attacked, it might have gotten to the portabl drive when I plug it in, no telling. I use retrospect at work with an external hard drive, haven't had to restore from it.

my pc came with PC-illin, Trend Micro, it updates itself daily, no problems so far. at work we run the enterprise version of mcafee, I would have bought that if this other hadn't come onboard.

yes, IT folks love to wipe drives, fixes a world of things. but then, they have access to servers to back up whatever they need, so not quite the same stress for them. one I know said he periodically (maybe 1x/yr) wipes and rebuilds his harddrive just on principle. wow.