Dorchester Computer Repair Blog

If you have ever had your computer give up the ghost then you know how stressful it can be to get it back up and running as well as taking a very long time to load up all your programs if you have quite a few.

Over the years I have seen my fair share of problems with my computers.  But there has been one thing that has saved me at least twice in the last few years.  One time when everything seemed to be gone off of my hard disk, I sent it away to a data recovery services company for a hard disk Data Recovery.  Luckily they were able to recover every piece of information that went missing.

And the second of course was to ensure you back up your computer so that even if you accidently delete a file you have a back up copy.

Tags: Data recovery services

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Gadgets come and gadgets go but one thing most have in common is that over a period of time there seems to be an overwhelming drive to make things smaller and smaller.

Sometimes it’s simply for aesthetics sake and sometimes it is as an aid to portability or space saving especially around the home or home office where space is often at a premium.

Most of us are familiar with external storage devices in the form of external hard disk enclosures and some of us will also be familiar with network attached storage (NAS) devices, but the NAS world has just downsized big style with the announcement of the worlds smallest NAS device, the Thecus N0204 mini NAS.

This diminutive contender is no slouch though and is still a fully featured NAS device but on a very small scale with a 132 x 88 x 63mm footprint and tipping the scales at a less than half a bag of sugar by all accounts although weight will vary depending upon your hard disk configuration.

Even in this tiny form the Thecus N0204 can still support up to 1TB of storage either in raid O, raid 1 or just a bunch of disks format and if that was not enough the drive bays are hot swappable and it also features auto-rebuild.

The Thecus N0204 mini NAS is probably more suited to the home or home office environment in reality but given the data access, networking functionality and additional feature set of the device means that it would be equally at home in an office environment as well.

Tags: Thecus N0204, Thecus N0204 mini NAS

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To help understand why a fragmented hard can slow down your computer it may help to understand the process better, or how the  operating system populates the drive.

A hard drive consists of a number of different blocks and sectors and this is where your data is actually stored. When you write data to the drive rather than place the data in s predetermined position the data is dropped almost randomly over the entire platter or multiple platters in large hard drives.

To exacerbate matters a single file can consist of a number of individual pieces of information that are scattered around and when you query the drive for the information the drive heads have to visit multiple sectors of the drive to pick up the full file.

This is in effect like cutting up your credit card and scattering the individual pieces around the house, if you go on line to make a purchase you would then have to run round the house to collect all the individual pieces of your card in order to make payment (get the file our need).

In hard drive terms this is called a fragmented drive. A fragmented hard drive can also shorten the lifespan of your hard disk as the heads have to work many times harder to scour the drive to find all the parts of the fragmented file.  Windows has its own free defragmentation utility you can use as part of your system maintenance, or you could buy a more refined version that lets you set automatic background defragmentation of your drive during slack processor and usage cycles.

Tags: Hard Drive Defragmentation

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I guess we have all been there at one stage or another. You have been working on an important project, business proposal or even spent days and sometimes weeks writing an academic paper and all of a sudden the file is no longer there and panic sets in.

You check your deleted files with no luck and do a full search on your computer but the file or folder has simply vanished. In all probability the file is still on your hard disk but for some reason cannot be found which may be the first signs of a degraded drive.

You should be able to recover a deleted file or a lost file provided you have not overwritten the sector with additional data, so if the file is really important try not to write anything else to the drive, and avoid the temptation to use data recovery software for important files.

Your local data recovery services company will be able to help with all your file recovery and hard drive recovery needs and will do there utmost to ensure the original data integrity is maintained.

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If you have ever suffered from computer recovery problem, you know how frustrating it can be. Computer data recovery is a difficult task at the best of times. Many people forget to back up their computer data or simply can’t be bothered and when a data loss happens, you can be very traumatic.

You should try to make backups at least once a week or even more often, and you should backup your most important documents every day. But, even with the best backup strategy one day or another all of us have something go wrong on our computers, and it always seems to happen at just the wrong time.

Of course if you want the easy option then you will look into remote backup as once you have backed up your initial data other back up can be done incrementally or even on the fly so your backup headache can run automatically in  the background without any input from you.

Remote backup is very useful for business users as well and in a lot of cases it is an essential part of their business continuity plan. If they do have a data loss emergency a backup is available almost immediately

If you do have a major data loss problem though you can always get the help of a data recovery expert, they will probably be able  to restore all your data even after having the hard drive completely ruined, as long as you choose a professional company and not a computer repair firm that just dabbles and will more than likely ruin your data as opposed to save it (and then tell you it was not recoverable anyway).

Your data is very valuable and its not till you think you have lost it that you realise the error of your ways! Do yourself a favour and sort out your backup strategy today.

Tags: Online Data Backup

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