- those that attack Steve Gibson usually have some agenda. I don’t understand why there is such vitriol against him. He’s a terrific guy who has developed terrific tools

- if SpinRite doesn’t work, you get your money back. Instantly. Steve honors his warranty.

It’s the best solution out there and its free if it doesn’t work. What’s the harm in trying it.

…Dale

Important files, pics, docs can be shipped off to the cloud via something like Mozy for peace of mind and runs a few dollars a month. Although, disk images and other stuff could also be offloaded to Amazon S3 with something like Jungle Disk. (Assuming you don’t have a restrictive broadband cap…)

It would be great if you could do an article on backup solutions for PCs. This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while. Like most people, I have most of my digital media on a single hard drive.

I’d kill for a Time Machine-like solution on Windows. Lately, I’ve been considering Rebit (www.rebit.com). Has anyone had any success with it? Can you suggest a similar solution?

PC repair is part of my tech support business. SpinRite is unparalleled in repairing malfunctioning hard drives. The price of $90, for a one-time license, use on any drive you own, forever, is nothing compared to the prospect of never recovering lost data, irreplaceable photos and videos. It may not be fast but it works when everything else doesn’t.

http://partedmagic.com/

regardless, if you drive is making the infamous “click” its scratching the platters… you need an app that can make an actual bit copy of the drive, its the only way to get the most data off the drive as possible…

I don’t know much about SpinRite in particular, but I do see a couple big negatives to it:

1) Cost: It seems completely unnecessary to spend $90 on something like this when there are so many other free tools out there. 90% of the time you don’t need anything other than an external enclosure or a generic live CD. When you need something more powerful, there are things like the UBCD4win or SystemRescueCD, both of which are free.

2) When a hard drive really does have a big problem, SpinRite might not be the best tool. If you’re having a hardware problem with your hard drive its important to very quickly get the data off before the drive completely fails. SpinRite isn’t designed to work quickly. It will try to read and re-read a hard drive sector over and over again until it recovers the sector. I think you’re much better off trying to quickly get off whatever data is undamaged, and then go back and work on the harder stuff.

As for my recommendations, I’d say people should first try to recover data by removing the hard drive, putting it in an external enclosure, and putting it into a different computer. I suspect that would work the vast majority of the time. But, it does require special hardware, which not everyone has on-hand.

If you don’t have an enclosure, and don’t want to buy one, I’d recommend either SystemRescueCD or UBCD4win. You can just download SystemRescueCD, which is nice, but you do have to “build” UBCD4win yourself. You need to do this because UBCD4win actually uses Microsoft Windows files, and the UBCD4win guys can’t redistribute those files. So, they give you a tool for getting those files off of WinXP CDs. It’s not hard, but it does involve lots of steps that you’re probably not going to want to do when you’re in a hurry to recover your data. As Dave does, it might be a good idea to create one of those CDs when everything is working just to have in around in case you run into problems.

SystemRescueCD and UBCD4win also contain a lot of tools for doing more sophisticated data recovery. I’d probably recommend UBCD4win slightly above SystemRescueCD, mainly because I think its a little easier to use.