Ok I’ve just painstakingly restored all the posts I could find since September 10th until now from Google Cache.

I’ve worked out the maximum posts missing would be 1 as I could get the cache back to September 12th and the latest post before that is September 10th, or I might not have posted on September 11th anyway.

Anyhow things should all be restored now – and it was incredibly boring…so it shows the power of taking regular backups. I’m incredibly thankful I took my own backup on September 10th…I can’t imagine what it would be like if I hadn’t backed up or it was 2-3 months out of date.

I made a few upgrades as well seen as though I was re-installing the whole site..I’ve upgraded to the latest branch of Wordress – 2.3 and I’ve internalized the tags so they no longer point to Technorati. I’ve also upgraded all plugins and mods so we should be stable and secure now.

You can now click the tags on the index or inside posts and they will take you to the tag archive page for that tag.

The sites feels a bit faster and more responsive to me after I’ve upgraded to 2.3, but that might just be me.

Do let me know what the performance is like from your side.

I’m most likely going to get a VPS to run Darknet on, so there might be a very minor down-time shortly when I shift over to that, but after that it should be rock steady and fast.

If you spot anything funky or something going wrong/error/weird behaviour/files missing just drop me a comment or use the contact form and let me know.

Regular posting will resume in the next 1-2 days after I get some sleep.

Thanks for the kind words, e-mails and comments – I appreciate it!

Backup Platinum is an Windows platform backup program to make another copy of your important stuff so if your PC burns/gets pwned/crashes etc you won’t lose everything.

It supports backup by Hard or USB drives, CD-R/W or DVD±R/RW media, FTP server or Local Area Network (LAN).

It’s easy enough to download and install, you can grab it here (It’s only 2.6MB).

You’ll need Microsoft 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003 and about 3MB of free disk space.

The interface immediately fires up a backup wizards when you first start the software, this guides you nicely through how to setup a new backup job or synchronize your data between two locations.

It supports a good range of files such as Registry Files, Outlook Express Files, MSN Files and so on.

Sadly it’s too MS-centric, I would like to see support for Thunderbird and Firefox files and settings.

I tested backup via FTP and it worked well allowing me to browse the remote FTP location within the interface and choose the location I wished to save the files.

It supports various encryption options (128-bit) with Blowfish to ensure file integrity and confidentiality.

The DVD/CD-Writing module also supports spanning across multiple disks and it integrates with windows scheduler so once you have created the jobs you can schedule your backups at regular intervals.

Backup Platinum is priced at a fairly reasonable $67USD per license, honestly for this kind of software (it’s not rocket science) I’d prefer to see it around $30USD.

It’s simple software and it does what it’s supposed to do, good job.

Handy Recovery is pretty neat software, there is occasions when I’m using Windows and I need to recover something or I’ve deleted something by mistake (I have a habit of using SHIFT+DEL so it’s not even in the recycle bin.

I usually use Active Undelete and was pretty happy with it, I got a chance to try out this software though and looked pretty cool.

I have to say I do prefer Handy Recovery to Active Undelete, it’s faster, small (Only 876kb including installer) and the best part is it gives an actual probability of data recovery for each file.

Plus it has a pretty neat filter/search system for finding specific files if you don’t know their location. The program supports FAT 12/16/32, NTFS and NTFS 5 + EFS file systems. This tool can recover files from deleted and formatted partitions or create disk images for deferred recovery. It shows probability of successful recovery for each file and features in-depth disk scanning for certain file types. According to Microsoft, Handy Recovery turned out to be among the first 100 applications that have earned the “Certified for Windows Vista” logo.

The Interface is nice and simple and it runs through the analysis stage pretty quickly, it’s very easy to recover files (recommended to recover to a different partition to reduce chances of permanent data loss) and just takes a couple of clicks.

The trial version is limited to recover 1 file per day and can be download here:

Handy Recovery

There is also a freeware ‘lite’ version here:

Handy Recovery Lite

System Requirements

Windows 95/98/NT/2000/ME/XP/Vista
File systems: FAT12/16/32 or NTFS/NTFS 5.

You can purchase Handy Recovery here:

Order Handy Recovery

It’s pretty reasonably priced at $39US for 1-4 copies with discounts if you buy 5 or more.

Data recovery is an important subject and it’s definitely a good thing to have a positive understanding of data recovery and how it could effort you personally or your business.

So someone told me about this Data recovery article which is a decent original reference to data recovery which contains some good original information, links to other similar resources, free data recovery downloads and an explanation of the main parts involved.

Definition: Data recovery is the salvaging of data originally stored on media such as magnetic disks and tapes and which has become corrupt or inaccessible.

The sidebar is pretty useful on the Data recovery article so do check it out, it has software, services and links to more information on industry standard sites like Wikipedia.

It also has related articles and related companies like OnTrack.

The article also covers some basic parts of forensics, like how when an item is deleted it’s not actually gone, just the marker in the file allocation table is removed.

Can erased data be recovered?

Yes, usually. When you delete a file the file is not actually deleted. It’s just the entry in the index pointing to the file’s actual location that is deleted. The file itself is left untouched but subsequent work you do on the PC could overwrite the location where the file was so it’s important to minimise any amateur attempts at data recovery.

This is something we’ve stressed many times at Darknet as any old $29.95 undelete tool can recover these files easily.

The important part of the article is the part about what mistakes you can make, this is crucial if you wish to save your data integrity in case of a failure.

I do find the design of the page a little plain (it looks like something designed in 1997) and the pink and light blue colour scheme jars my eyes a little.

The info is laid out clearly though and the site is easy to navigate, which is a good thing.

You can read more about Data Recovery at Wiki here.