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Data recovery is a service that doesn’t always yield results, and having done it a few times, I know that whenever a hard drive or a solid state drive fails, the data on it has a very good chance of being lost forever. There are tools that can help recover data in the event of a failure, but please know that nothing is guaranteed.

The process of rescuing data can also be very time consuming; we had one project on the tech bench that ran for __ten days__ trying to extract data from the drive. Something was pulled off, but whether or not it is intact data instead of nothing but 1s and 0s of gibberish has yet to be determined.

One tool we use is Data Rescue by Prosoft. It’s a handy OS X software to have to try and extract information, but if the drive in question has failed, expect it to take anywhere from hours to weeks to fully scan the drive. There was a project I was working on a while back, and the Data Rescue scan took three days and the subsequent extraction took four. Thankfully, we were able to extract the customer’s valuable data on that one.

One problem that has been coming up a lot is that the board on the hard disk itself gets shocked and it no longer is seen by anything it’s plugged into. We’re unfortunately not able to extract any data when we see this type of failure. Next step: DriveSavers. Thought not cheap, they have the expensive equipment to be able to pull the drives apart and read the data directly from the platters inside.

Another type of failure is physical failure — you know, when there is a clicking or grinding sound coming from them as they attempt to spin up and function. People ask me all the time what makes a drive fail, and my answer is that it’s most commonly when the machine is dropped, bumped, or generally handled roughly. Anything can really cause the little read/write heads inside to nick the platters and scratch them.

“Bad Blocks” are another form of failure, wherein the platters themselves are no longer able to hold information. Any information written cannot be retained, causing corrupted data. Once a hard drive starts having bad blocks, it’s only a matter of time before the drive fails completely.

Moral of this story? Back up your information to another hard drive or utilize a cloud storage backup service!

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Apple knows how important it is to back up, so they created the Time Machine application. Pre-installed, user friendly, and set to perform seamless automatic backups every hour, Apple users no longer have an excuse to NOT back up their data.

However, as simple as Apple has made it to prevent catastrophic data loss, sometimes Time Machine just doesn’t behave. This becomes complicated because Apple doesn’t advertise immediate solutions on how to resolve the issue of your drive not completing scheduled back ups.

I thought I’d provide a simple solution that can save you a phone call to AppleCare. It’s called Time Machine Buddy — a free download from apple that gets installed within your widgets. What this neat little app does is provide a more in-depth look at the processes that occur during a time machine backup.

You can download the app “*here.*”:http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/timemachinebuddy.html

After you install it and save it to your dashboard, connect your drive and run a Time Machine back up, and watch Time Machine Buddy start logging the activity. Even though most of the computer language may seem foreign to the average user, there is one log in particular that’s worth looking for as your Time Machine progress bar runs on for infinity.

“Node requires deep traversal.” In a more simplified way, this means that Time Machine’s app is having an issue with saving backups to your drive. This can quickly be remedied with a reformat of your external drive, and re-running Time Machine.

Of course, this requires that you either save your most current back up to another destination, or that your current system is up to date with any important data. To reformat your drive, simply open up Disk Utility in the *Applications < Utilities* folder, select your problematic external drive, select the "Erase" tab. Once it completes the reformat, open up Time Machine, select the freshly formatted drive, and voila! Time Machine will resume its back ups successfully.

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_Hello Readers,_

There has been a lot going around in the Apple rumor mill about testing on the iPhone and iPads. The rumor is that Apple is trying out designs to make these iOS devices bigger to compete with the likes of Samsung and HTC’s current mobile offerings. The rumor is that the overall size of the iPhone would be extended past the current generation’s 4-inch size, and the iPad would boast a reported 13-inch display (rather than the current 9.7-inch).

I hope this never leaves the rumor mill, because I’m a big fan of the size of the iPhone 5 now, and am a fan of the iPad mini over the regular iPad. They have gotten excellent reviews at their current sizes and I don’t see much need for the extra space; tablets are supposed to be portable. We will have to see what Apple will choose to do with the next generation of their iOS devices.

This week, we have quite a diverse selection to read about here at Tech Tails! Kyle writes about the trials of recovering data. Chris writes a great article about the ins and outs of DIY Fusion Drives and Jeremy has a great article about an application called Time Machine Buddy.

Enjoy the great articles and feel free to give us your feedback!

_Barry_
“*barry@smalldog.com*”:mailto:barry@smalldog.com