Coming from the perspective of one who does data recovery for a living, I see a huge problem with SSD. Most people have been led to believe that their data is safe on solid state and don't backup. However, they are leaving themselves open to huge disappoint and very high data recovery costs. So, I strongly urge those who migrate over to SSD to be sure to have their data properly backed up. As for the suggestions above with RAID 1, it should be noted that no RAID setup is an alternative to backup. RAID is meant to avoid downtime, but it by no means, an alternative to having your data stored in multiple places at one point in time.

I'm not saying that SpinRite is the cause of the final head crash. However, blindly running a program before dealing with physical issues will only lead to disaster.

"Before using SpinRite on any system for the first time, BACK UPTHE HARD DISK'S DATA!" Page 7 of the SpinRite User Manual

SpinRite remaps damaged sectors. If there are failing sectors on the drive, it may work, providing that the failing sectors aren't due to failing media or heads. A true data recovery program does not alter the original hard drive and does everything in its power to prevent the remapping of a sector. Once a sector is remapped, you cannot go back.

I strongly discourage SpinRite. I recently discussed this with an IT professional who didn't believe me. However, after running SpinRite on a drive that did detect before being run, the program did not complete and the drive no longer detected.

When the drive was brought in for assessment, it was determined that the heads crashed and that the data was no longer recoverable. If we would have received the drive prior to SpinRite being run, we would have changed the heads and recovered the data. Instead, the end user lost everything.

...it only cost the tech $89 to destroy the client's drive. Nice.

XFS? Try UFS Explorer.

As an official Data Recovery Professional, most of the over the counter tools work well in various situations. But, most require a stable hard drive with minimal sector damage.

- The first step in data recovery is to stabilize the drive. (leave this to the pros...and we DON'T use freezers)
- The next step is to do a sector level mirror. We use very expensive hardware for this step. DD will work, but if the drive has a lot of media damage, it may be still worth getting a professional to do the job before the problem gets worse.
- The next step is to deal with the file system and recovery. This is where your software tools come in. Again, we use very expensive programs for this step, but we also play with some of the programs mentioned above.

When I talk to IT professionals about using our services, they have a preconceived idea that data recovery always costs thousands of dollars. This is usually because the IT professional does everything they can think of (freezer, open the drive, tap with a hammer) to recover the data before passing the job over to the data recovery lab. As a result, the data recovery labs tend to charge more because of the added problems caused by the previous attempts. My company does not charge more because of what was done, but we have had to give clients bad news because the data is unrecoverable because of what was done.

In short, if the data is valuable, don't use the freezer or programs like SpinRite; rather, get a free quote by a data recovery professional. If the price is too high, get a second opinion. If the second opinion is too high, then you have nothing to lose.

I've downloaded the game, but haven't tried it yet. I think it will be fun and only intend to play it in-house with people I know. We are more interested in playing the game than cheating. If I have to cheat to win, it just doesn't seem worth playing.

But, to the better part of this release. The fact that a single directory download can be run from within Windows, Linux and MacOS. I think that development like this can revolutionize software development in the future. If all software vendors would design their software in the same way, then the OS war could really begin. Right now, most places are restricted to MS Windows because of their accounting package they use or the games they play.

Imagine purchasing a single application and not having to match it with an OS. This would basically make choosing an OS no different than choosing between KDE and Gnome for a desktop.

The big question that comes to mind, will application developers ever adopt this model?

Contact your local or favorite data recovery lab and see what they'll give you for them. I know that when we really need a drive, we've been known to pay $200 for a drive that is really not worth any more than $20.

I agree that amount of money is not that appealing to most of the larger data recovery labs. To assign a technician away from making $10,000+ a day, where is the incentive?

I'm not sure that there would be enough publicity from succeeding on this challenge to make up for the lost time. Would any Slashdotters go to a much more expensive data recovery lab if they could do the impossible?

As a data recovery technician, we wipe drives every day...always with a single pass.

During the recovery process, we mirror the damaged drives to an in-house drive, from which we do the file recovery process. After each project is completed and closed, we wipe the drive and reuse it for another project. If a single pass was not enough, we'd be getting shadows of other people's data in our recoveries. Of course, our mirror process is pretty much the same as a wipe, as it literally overwrites each sector of the destination drive with data from the source drive.

I'd hate to run a three pass wipe on our 1TB drives every day. It already takes 3-4 hours to wipe them with a single pass with our high speed tools writing at around 95MB/second.

So, to sum it up, I support the single pass theory.

Personally, I think it is somewhat silly to say that Apple cannot survive without Mr. Jobs. That being said, I couldn't think of a better time for Microsoft to start buying up Apple stocks.