How data recovery software uncovered corruption in govt. offices in India ?

How to recover the lost money in case of corruption? Is it possible to recover data from a formatted computer, to prove corruption or mismanagement in public sector units - PSUs.

People from both the sides of such cases are often asking such questions. Here, we are trying to discuss all the technical aspects of hiding, vanishing and recovering data from a computer hard drive.

When the whole world is going towards digital era, we, the Indians, are also moving in same direction. The government offices are storing, sending and maintaining data (both new and old) by means of computers. In computers, the data is stored in hard drives, which can be edited, deleted and restored. This is the media where all the spreadsheets, ledgers, letters and forms are saved and maintained.

In older days and even now, in some govt. sectors, document means paper. It was so difficult to refer, time taking to create and costly to manage those piles of paper.

You would have heard many times that in 80’s and 90’s, whenever a case of corruption is revealed, the documents or files used to be destroyed to wipe out all the proofs. But, now days, this is done by just formatting the hard drive.

Here is a real story of such an event, which took place in central government pension office. In the month of April 2013 when a team of auditors came for the annual audit, it was found a huge gap between allotment and actual distribution of pensions to old age women. Upon being asked for the list of pensioners, it was said that systems got formatted accidentally and all the data were lost.

Here, we would like to mark that in computer hard drive, when we delete or format data, it’s not actually the data, which gets removed, but it’s reference from the OS address book. Now, according to OS the memory is free but your data still remains in hard drive.

Fortunately, one of the team members of audit team knew this and searched for some tools to recover the lost data. He got a list of many such software which can bring the data back even from a formatted hard disk. The team used Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery Software to recover Mac data. 

The software brought all the lost data back in their original form and revealed all the discrepancies in records. It disclosed to the government a corruption of millions after which the culprits were sentenced for penalty and imprisonment for 5 years.

So, at the end, it could be a lesson for all such defaulters who try to hide their game because all their crime for years can be highlighted within minutes, with the help of advanced applications like data recovery software.

Review of Photo recovery software for Mac

For a common man like me, photos means sweet memories but for professionals, photos are more than just memories. For them, losing photos means losing opportunities, losing money and sometimes-even jobs.

I witnessed such an incident, which took place with my younger brother, a model. A few months ago when he was struggling for opportunities, he prepared his portfolio with a very famous photographer, which cost him $ 600.00. He was ready with all the required preparations, waiting for some opportunities.

Finally, the day came when he was called by a very famous advertising company and was asked to send his portfolio through mail. But, as you know, the thing, which only lacks in perfect chance is called the luck. So happened in my brother’s case also.

When he sat to mail his portfolio from his Macbook, he didn’t find the volume where he stored it. He searched all the volumes but, all in vain. Finally, he came to me because all of my relatives, except me, see me as a techie guy.

I discovered that the volume was lost and all the content of that volume were inaccessible to the user. Here are the possible reasons behind such unusual behavior of Mac volume.

• Resizing hard drive partitions with built-in Disk Utility of Mac OS X
• Improper change in file system of Mac partition either from FAT to HFS or vice-versa.
• Conflicts among the hardware might cause partition crash resulting in loss of Mac partitions
• Mac OS X malfunctioning can result in loss of volume and ultimately data loss situation.
• Corrupted APM (Apple Partition Map) can make your partition inaccessible.

When I failed to get my data back , even after applying all my brilliance, I searched for some volume recovery software for Mac. I found Stellar Phoenix Mac data recovery which brought all the content back within no time. It is so impressive that I was pushed to review this Mac data recovery and share my experience with you.

It is www.RegainMacData.com, the official website of the product which offers download for trial version of Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery Software v6.0.

RegainMacData.com

The welcome screen offers 1. Recover Data 2. Create Image and 3. Resume recovery

I clicked “Recover Data”  which again offered many options.

Homescreen

Since I was to get back my lost volume so went to “Search lost/deleted volume”. It started scanning the drive for lost volume and asked me to select one out of two to proceed further.

After selecting lost volume 2, I went for deleted recovery which started scanning for lost data in it. A list of all the recoverable data (which included the portfolio) was given with option to preview, before actually recovering the data.

Please note that it’s not a fee tool and costs $99.00 to register and get the complete version of this Mac Data recovery tool.

Recover Mac Data with Windows system

A few days ago when my Macbook got crashed and the hard drive remained working, I was trying to get my data back with the help of Windows Machine. But, I was wondering if I could install some Mac data recovery software on Windows to scan my drive and carve the data out.

While searching for some solution to recover Mac data on Windows PC , I came across Stellar Phoenix Mac on Windows. This application scans hard drive attached with windows machine, to scan for all types of data.

How to recover Mac data on Windows

• Install Stellar Phoenix Mac and select your desired option out of – Drive Recovery, iPod recovery, Photo Recovery, Resume Recovery, Create Image.
• In case of "iPod Recovery", it enlists all the iPod(s) connected to the system.
• The Photo recovery offers all the volumes in your machine. You need to select the one where your photos reside. It previews the selected file/photos, which are recoverable. 
• Select the files and folders that you want to recover and click Recover.
• The trial version offers a free scan, which can be saved and resumed later with “Resume Recovery”. Its saves time

Why I preferred this software

• Can recover all types of lost or deleted files and folders
• Retrieves volumes which are either lost or deleted
• File Filter option to retrieve any specific type of files
• Can create and save image of drive
• Option to preview files before actually recovering them
• Supports HFS, HFS+, HFSX, HFS Wrapper file systems

Final Comment

Although there can be many software to serve the same task but, what matters the most is ease to use and cost effectiveness. Stellar Phoenix Mac is the name I can refer in all these respects.

 

Defragmentation App to Boost Your Mac Performance Considerably

“Perhaps you are not aware of the fact that apart from a few common causes like, the overfilled hard drive, accumulation of temporary files, and obsolete system configuration, fragmentation is the major cause of degraded the performance of your Mac. Fragmentation, nevertheless, is one of the foremost causes of the poor performance of your Mac that causes data scattering. Nothing else, but the HFS+ file system is responsible for fragmentation on Macs.”

Since Mac computers perform considerably well as compared to others, they are termed as the excellent computers. However, perhaps you have not thought of your Mac slowing down gradually after a certain period of rigorous usage when booting as well as during data read/write operations. Meanwhile, you come across a colored spinning beach ball that many times leads to Mac freezing. During this state, your Mac boots sluggishly and the applications run poorly. Sometimes, one or more of the apps cash when running concurrently.

In such an annoying situation, many of the users do not even know what the causes of the issue and they directly contact with Mac technicians for help. Taking help from experts when you do not know what to do is certainly a wise decision. However, even this does not guarantee that the same issue will not arise again. Well, you need to be clear with the fact that excellence lacks a lot to meet perfection and therefore, the performance degradation is strongly associated with every machine and so does with Macs.

“Fragmentation refers to data being scattered when it is stored on the hard drives.”

Mac OS X uses the HFS+ file system to format its hard drive (i.e. to be used for data read/write operations), as it cannot read/write data on a raw disk. During formatting, the Mac file system splits up the hard drive space into blocks in order to store files individually. However, this scheme does not involve the sizes of the files (which is the vital factor) to be stored in the storage blocks. As a result, when you save a large file on your Mac, based on its size, Mac file system divides this into a number of segments of smaller sizes. After that, each of these segments gets a separate storage block.

As mentioned above, since Mac file system divides the storage space into blocks, each file having its size larger than that of the block is broken into segments of smaller sizes. This means that a file segment is saved properly in the storage block based on their mutual (i.e. of both the storage block and file segment) size compatibility. If the size of the file segment is smaller than that of the storage block it is allocated, then that particular block contains free space along with the file segment. Likewise, a slew of such blocks can be found inside contiguously allocated regions on your Mac drive, which are thus termed as internal fragmentation.

During execution of the system files of any user program, binary data is produced at intermediate stages, which is stored on your Mac drive. However, certain storage allocation algorithms are inefficient and therefore, fail to organize these blocks. As a result, data of a single file is stored being scattered. Since many unallocated storage blocks surround the allocated ones, all these blocks collectively are referred to as causing external fragmentation.

As mentioned above, in case of external fragmentation, the segments of an individual file are located in non-contiguous blocks. This means that data of the file is scattered and is thus termed as data fragmentation.

Apart from the internal factors, a few external ones are also responsible for fragmentation. For example, moving a large file from one location to another on your Mac empties a slew of the storage blocks. Mac users believe that Macs do not come across fragmentation, as they include the HFS+ file system that minimizes the need to defrag files on Mac OS X. However, it does not eliminate fragments.

“Defragmentation involves rearranging the storage blocks of the hard drive logically aspiring to reduce the response time of data, which eliminates that fragments throughout the hard drives and improves the performance of the Mac system.”

Whenever you open a file on your Mac, the HFS+ file system scans this file thoroughly for fragments. If this file is found to be highly fragmented (i.e. having eight or more fragments), it is defragmented automatically. However, not every file satisfies this criteria (i.e. the file should not be more than 20MB of size) to be defragmented automatically. Therefore, you have to defrag large files (i.e. the files more than 20MB of size) using a professional disk defragmentation application and hence, to get its performance improved.

Mac disk defragmentation application analyzes (scans all storage blocks, storage algorithm used for storage blocks allocation, and the remaining free blocks as well) your Mac drive thoroughly at the initial step. Technically, defragmentation involves maintaining the storage blocks that containing data to yield the highly efficient storage blocks with reduced number of fragments. For this, all storage blocks containing data are rearranged logically, which improves the productivity of your Mac. Besides, it uses compaction mechanism to impede fragmentation to occur again by creating larger regions of free spaces on your Mac drive. This minimizes the response time of data and hence, it improves the performance of your Mac system.

When it comes to selection of a reliable defragmentation app to defrag files on Mac, since a slew of defragmentation apps for Mac are available on the Internet, you may get confused and choose any of them randomly. However, using an inefficient defragmentation app may cause undesired results. In fact, you may lose your data due to inefficient rearrangement of the storage blocks. Well, if you are unable to final which app is to choose for your Mac, then you can contact Mac experts for help. You must go through the software user manual before using it, as the security of both your data and the Mac system is must. Besides, there is no doubt that you do not want your data to be lost.

Mac Drive toolbox to fix overall disk related problems on Mac OS X

Are you searching for some application to solve disk related issues in your Mac Lion , Mountain Lion or Mavericks? Here we are with the solution.

Different computer operating systems use different file systems to format their hard drives. For example, Windows operating systems use both FAT and NTFS file systems, whereas Mac OS X uses the HFS+ file system to format its hard drive. To be more precise, in order to use a hard drive on a particular computer, you need to format it with the file system it supports. Based on the flaws a file system contains, data storage often becomes faulty or messy, which leads to degraded performance of the computers.

As mentioned earlier, Mac OS X formats its hard drive with the HFS+ file system (also known as Mac OS Extended (Journaled)) that is quite smart as compared to its predecessors in different versions of Macintosh operating system. When you format a hard drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), its storage space is divided into blocks of certain sizes that are divisible by 8, 16, 24, 32, and so on, aiming for data storage. When a program is executed, it requests the file system for storage blocks to store the data produced as the program’s output. In response to this, Mac file system allocates the nearest empty blocks to save the data. Meanwhile, there are a lot of chances that a few of the blocks contain free space along with the data, which is termed as the fragment. Likewise, a hard drive may contain a slew of fragmented blocks. 

“Fragmentation is a phenomenon that occurs due to inefficient utilization of the storage space of the hard drives, which results in reduced performance of the computer.”

Suppose that an array numbers [2, 4, 6, 8, 12] is produced as the result of execution of a program. Based on the size of the array produced, the program requests for 34 bytes space on the hard drive. However, since a large block of 34 bytes is not available, Mac file system divides the data into two segments, where one segment is of 32 bytes and another is of 2 bytes. However, an inefficient storage allocation algorithm may divide a file of 32 bytes into a number of segments and store in non-contiguous blocks, many of which contain free space. This causes storage space being wasted. In such a situation, the free space available inside the contiguously allocated regions is termed as internal fragmentation.

On the other hand, the implementation of an inefficient storage allocation algorithm causes storing a single file at multiple locations being scattered. Besides, such algorithms also fail to reorganize the scattered data of a single file in a logical order. Now, since free spaces are available outside the allocated regions, these are thus termed as external fragmentation.

In case of external fragmentation, since large blocks of free space are unavailable, HFS+ file system breaks large files into segments of smaller sizes. This causes scattering of data of a single large file and thus, it is termed as data fragmentation.

In fact, fragmentation is one of the major problems that computer users face. Fragmentation results in poor response from the data stored on the hard drive. In such a situation, your Mac boots sluggishly, programs execute poorly, and many like symptoms ultimately point towards degraded performance of your Mac system. A highly fragmented disk may lead to its crash and you may lose all your data, which you cannot avoid unless you use a professional application to defrag Mac drive.

Though Mac OS X includes Disk utility to fix the problems you encounter when using your Mac, it lacks disk defragmentation and speedup/cleanup tool to improve Mac performance. Well, you do not have to fuss over the issue, as you can use external disk defragmentation application instead. 

“The term defragmentation refers to the process that involves reorganizing the storage blocks of the hard drive logically in order to minimize the number of fragments.”

In addition to the internal factors, many external factors are also responsible for poor performance of your Mac. In order to fix all these problems simultaneously, a professional Mac cleaning application is required that can clean up the following areas of your Mac: 

Overfilled Mac volumes 

Today, computers provide huge amount of data storage space (e.g. 500GB or 1TB) in order to store massive amount of data. In order to store different types of data separately, you partition this storage space into required number of volumes. In case you have a collection of your favorite movies, there are chances that the volume storing movies being overfilled.

A volume is referred to as overfilled if the amount of free space available on it is below 10% of its storage capacity. Ideally, a disk must not be filled more than 90% of its capacity.

Since an overfilled disk may lead to corruption anytime, make sure none of your Mac volumes contains data more than 90% of its storage capacity (i.e. is not overfilled). In case your Mac has a number of volumes, you need to go for a check. If you find any of its volumes overfilled, remove all useless data and make your Mac system free from any such risk. Instead, you can use a professional Mac cleanup application that is able to remove unused files, large files, and other system-generated wastes. This not only improves the performance of your Mac, but frees up disk space as well. 

Mac Login items 

You must have noticed that one or more of the applications installed on your Mac are launched automatically as it boots to desktop. This is because certain applications create startup shortcuts for themselves when they are installed. After that, whenever your Mac boots, these shortcuts are executed, thereby utilizing Mac system resources. This affects the Mac startup process and hence, it boots sluggishly.

In fact, more the number of login items the poorer is the Mac startup process. In order to remove all these items, you need to track the following path: Apple menu > System Preference > Users & Groups, and then click Login Items tab.

In the Login Items tab, choose your account at the left and click to select unnecessary login items, and then click delete (-) button. Well, if you do not want to remove these items manually, then you can use a Mac cleaning app instead. 

Email self-downloads 

Mac OS X includes Apple’s email client app that in addition to its several exciting features, facilitates having a quick-view of the email attachments by rapid double-clicking them.

In fact, every time you have quick-view of such an attachment, it is downloaded to your Mac automatically at a default email downloads location. This evidently means that based on the number of times you have had quick-view of an attachment, several copies of it can be found in downloads folder.

Remove all these automatically downloaded email attachments not only to free up Mac disk space, but also to increase your Mail app’s speed. 

Duplicate files 

You must be downloading images, songs, videos, applications, and many other things on your Mac from the Internet, don’t you? Once these files are downloaded, they are found at their default download locations, from where you either copy or move them to the locations where other files of similar type are stored.

However, if you have copy these files and save them to some other locations on your Mac disk, you actually duplicate these files. In order to remove all duplicate files stored on your Mac drive, you can use a professional Mac cleanup application.

Professional Mac cleanup applications are able to remove these system wastes not only from the boot volume of your Mac drive, but from other secondary volumes as well. This boosts the performance of your Mac considerably. 

Stellar Drive Toolbox v3.0

Therefore, in order to fix up all disk related problems, you are recommended to go for a drive toolbox for Mac, as it can fix up every feasible cause minimizing Mac performance effectively.

How smartphones are harmful for children – Parents must know

Many parents are unaware of the dangers their children face while using smartphones. About 20% of parents, according to a poll by BBC, said that their children go upset (once in a day) when they see something on their phones.

Of course there are many parents who talk to their kids and ask them to be away from these influencing things but until and unless we use controls or search engine filters children will naturally run for something, which disturbs their mental piece.

The research reveals that most of the parents think that internet is more harmful than smartphones and son, they are least bother about smartphone usage by their kids. But, the fact is that when children access web on their phones, they are using the same internet, with same level of risks. 

Tips for parents 

Here we suggest some tips for parents

• There should be an open talk in family about what the members are doing online
• Sit with your child to share your views about inappropriate content and convince them about bad effects of cheap materials on net.
• Interact with them so that they feel free to share with you if they come across something upsetting while social networking.

For adult users who trade online, it is recommended by Microsoft to set PINs for their mobile phones and strong passwords for online accounts.

What Makes You Upgrade Your Mac HDD to a Much Faster SSD

“Cloning your Mac drive is certainly a grand initiative to keep your data protected at the time when your Mac starts throwing errors or some similar situation is encountered. Once you clone your Mac, since it takes the bootable backup of your Mac drive, you can use the clone drive to boot your Mac machine in case it is unable to boot from the original drive. Since cloning Mac drive to an external USB drive is going to be portable and convenient, you can boot any Mac machine having same system configuration with the clone drive. Well, since SSDs are much faster than the HDDs, choosing an SSD as the destination drive would be more advantageous.”

Well, there ain’t any uncertainty that the data stored on your Mac drive is valuable and you cannot afford losing it any cost. However, a disaster may strike anytime and make you lose all your data. Since you cannot prevent a disaster to strike, you can certainly avoid losing your precious data by implementing an advanced technique, which is termed as cloning Mac HDD. Besides, cloning your Mac HDD not only prevents your data from being lost, but also copies all applications installed on it to the destination drive. One of the vital features of cloning the Mac HDD is that the process consumes considerable amount of time and system resources (i.e. RAM & Processor).

By the way, the term HDD is acronym for the Hard Disk Drive, the major source of secondary memory (i.e. the data storage space) embedded on your Mac system. In fact, the HDDs not only facilitate data storage space to large extent, but also contain all system files stored on a single Mac volume, termed as the boot volume.

You may wonder that why both the system files and user data are stored on a common drive. Well, storing your data and the operating system files on a single hard drive does not mean that both are stored on a common volume. In fact, storing data along with the system files on a common volume is quite risky, as you may lose all your data in case your Mac fails to boot. Therefore, partitioning the Mac HDD and storing all your data separate from the system files is the ultimate solution of this problem. Moreover, it becomes quite easy for Mac to access data when both are located on the same hard drive.

Using HDD on Macs

Have you ever thought of how data is stored on a HDD? What is there inside a HDD that facilitates Macs perform data read/write operations on it? Perhaps you have not; however, delving an HDD elucidates all such queries concurrently. In fact, the internal structure of an HDD is less or more a mechanical setup of electronic and magnetic components that is wrapped inside a metallic case. These components include an electrical panel powering up a spindle motor that rotates a magnetic disc (i.e. termed as the platter) and a read/write head (held by an actuator arm connected to an actuator axis) moves over it in back and forth fashion. The speed of this spindle motor is increased automatically when data read/write operations on the platter are carried out. This mechanical setup of the hard drive’s components makes it susceptible to corruption, as failure of any of these components cause the hard drive failure. Therefore, this keeps your precious data threatened 24*7*365.

Why cloning to SSD

Today, smart computers having embedded SSD are available worldwide that are thin, lightweight, and gives outstanding performance. Since it is possible to clone Mac HDD to SSD, you can get rid of your older Mac HDD and the related performance issues, as SSDs never slow down.

The term SSD is acronym for Solid State Drive that embeds Integrated Circuit chips unlike a HDD that embeds a magnetic disk (i.e. the platter) revolving over a spindle motor and a read/write head moving back and forth over it. In order to make substitution in computers and their applications easy, SSDs use the I/O interface meant for the HDDs. The vital feature of the SSDs is that the data transfer speed they offer is much faster as compared to that of the HDDs. Technically, the SSDs offer 100 times faster data read/write speed as compared to that of the HDDs.

Since SSDs apparently offer high-speed data read/write operations, it is obvious for you wishing to upgrade to a SSD on your Mac. However, for this, you will have to format and partition the new drive, reinstall Mac OS X, and shift all your data to it. Though you can perform each of these tasks on your own, all these operations consume system resources largely and require you being involved at each phase.

Well, you would certainly be glad to know that you can clone your Mac HDD to a brand new SSD using a professional Mac cloning application. Upgrading to SSD is recommended because it offers the following advantageous features:

High-speed Data Read/write operations

Since SSDs embed Integrated Circuit chips for data storage, one of the prime benefits of using the SSDs is that they offer high-speed data read/write operations. In fact, HDDs are capable of offering up to 1000MBPS data reading speed, whereas the fastest SSD today is SATA capable of offering 6GBPS data reading speed. These advantageous features make Mac users upgrade to an SSD.

SSDs are Reliable

SSDs are more reliable as compared to the HDDs, as SSDs do not embed mechanically set up electric and magnetic revolving and moving components making them unreliable. Hard drives are not reliable especially for frequent travelers. On the other hand, since the internal components of the SSDs are embedded electronically, they eliminate the odds of its failure.

Almost negligible heat, noise, and vibration

Since HDDs embed electronic circuit powering up the spindle motor to revolve the magnetic platter, all these components heat up because the speed of the spindle motor is highest during data read/write operations. Moreover, the incessantly revolving magnetic platter causes vibration and sometimes, the random noises. Since SSDs do not embed any such component, there is almost negligible noise and vibration.

No need for Defragmentation

Unlike HDDs, since the SSDs are manufactured to store data evenly in their sectors, Mac file system cannot split the storage space of a SSD into blocks to store data. This prevents fragmentation to occur on the SSDs. Therefore, when no fragments are there, you do not have to defragment the SSDs.

Cloning your Mac HDD to SSD

As the prime requirement for cloning, you must have a secondary disk (i.e. the SSD in this case). Make sure the SSD is larger or at least equal as compared to your Mac HDD. Moreover, you need a cloning tool for Mac as well. Once all these requirements are satisfied, you can start cloning your Mac HDD to an SSD. In case the SSD you have is brand new, you need to initialize it on Mac and then format it as Mac OS External (Journaled). For this, you need to track the following steps:

• Once you connect the SSD to your Mac, a Disk Insertion message pops up.

  

  Stellar Drive clone

• Click Initialize button on this message box.
• Clicking the Initialize button opens Disk Utility.
• Select the SSD in the left pane of Disk Utility and go to the Partition tab in the right pane.
• Here, click Options button and choose GUID Partition Table, and then click OK button.
• After that, click the Volume Scheme menu and select the number of partition to create

Important: In the Volume Scheme dropdown menu, the number of partition you select should be equal to that on your Mac drive.

• Now, give these partitions a Name, choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the volume Format, and specify a Size
• Finally, click Apply button to format and partition this SSD

After Disk Utility is finished with formatting and partitioning the SSD, you see this drive on your Mac desktop. You can use this SSD on your Intel-based Mac for both data storage and booting purpose, whereas only for data read/write purpose on a PowerPC-based Mac.

Now, all you need to do is clone your Mac HDD including all applications to this SDD. For this, you will have to boot your Mac Lion or Mountain Lion in Recovery Mode or an earlier Mac machine with Mac OS X install disc and follow these steps:

For Mac OS X Lion or Mountain Lion

• Restart your Mac and hold down the Command + R keys or the Option key
• Once you see the grey screen, release these keys
• Choose Disk Utility in the Utilities window

For earlier versions of Mac OS X

• Insert Mac OS X install disc and press the C key
• Release the C key as soon as you see the grey screen
• After that, select a preferred OS language and click the Next button
• Select Disk Utility in the Utilities window

Once Disk Utility is launched, go to its Restore tab. Herein; drag your Mac HDD to the Source field and the SSD to the Destination field. Finally, click Restore button to start cloning your Mac. Once Mac cloning is finished, quit Disk Utility and restart the Mac. On Mac keyboard, hold down the ALT key and choose the SSD to boot with. In case it boots successfully, you can replace the HDD with the clone SSD.