A basic locking cabinet can secure valuable papers or personal items but it will not protect them from theft or fire damage. Only safes can provide a superior level of protection for documents, jewelry, guns and personal items. Computer data that would be difficult or impossible to duplicate if lost.

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A basic locking cabinet can secure valuable papers or personal items but it will not protect them from theft or fire damage. Only safes can provide a superior level of protection for documents, jewelry, guns and personal items. computer data that would be difficult or impossible to duplicate if lost.

While paper records secured within a fire-rated safe can withstand temperatures up to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, computer media is damaged beyond use by temperatures above 125 degrees and 80% humidity. Microfiche film, tapes, diskettes, CDs, DVDs and computer media require the added protection of a data media safe.

Data Media Safes are specifically designed for data media storage. Protect against fire and climactic changes–a requirement for a small business or home office. A data media safe must keep the internal temperature below 125є and the humidity level below 85%. Several fire testing laboratories have tested our safes at a temperature of 1,832 degrees F for over one hour with internal temperatures remaining below 122 degrees F. The safes were awarded the one-hour label. In addition, the safes are manufactured under ISO 9002 quality standard requirements.

Fire could destroy your business! In fact, eight businesses burn almost every hour in the U.S. resulting in over 2.3 billion dollars in annual losses.* Unfortunately, seven out of ten businesses have not adequately protected their vital records. When that information is destroyed a business often fails. Don’t become a company that incurs fire damage resulting in critical loss of data (customer, personnel, accounting files, etc.) by not utilizing quality fire and data media safes. Survival is possible but preparation is necessary.

To view our inventory of Data Media Safes visit http://www.datamediasafes.com

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There are a number of data recovery software programs intended to help you when an emergency calls for data recovery, however it is important to determine when you can do the job by yourself, and when you need to use a professional data recovery service.

Keywords:
data recovery

There are a number of data recovery software programs intended to help you when an emergency calls for data recovery, however it is important to determine when you can do the job by yourself, and when you need to use a professional data recovery service.

Data recovery is a time consuming process that most of the time requires some level of technical knowledge in order to keep the integrity of the destroyed data destroyed no matter what the cause. Hard drive data recovery, when performed the wrong way, can lead to permanent data loss and even damage the surface.

Therefore, when it comes to deciding on data recovery software or professional data recovery service, stop for a while and think about it twice. How much do you know about the recovery processes? Are your computer skills enough to perform the operation by yourself? Is the software comprehensible and easy to use? Are there any warranties of full data recovery?

To all those questions, add the most important:
How critical is it for you or your business to recover the data that was lost?

Keep in mind that a professional service can recover all types of files, because they have the full versions of the most advanced data recovery software. Furthermore, they can also preview the files before recovering them so you will be provided with a data recovery from where you can choose which selected files to be retrieved or ask for all of them back.

Even when the hard drive data recovery is exposed to severe recovery situations, professional data recovery services can include additional support for over 300 specific file types and uncommon file types such as FLV and flash files, MIDI music files, digital media files, voice files, and many others.

Another service that professionals can offer and you probably will not be able to implement, except if you are an IT technician, is the emergency boot media, which allows you to recover data from systems that cannot boot Windows due to data loss, hard drive damage or virus attack.

Sometimes you can have the knowledge and skills, the data recovery software, but not the time. Professional services can perform the recovery because of time constraints, offering a solution for almost any hard drive situation or the critical nature of the data recovery.

Such hard drive data recovery solutions may include the most advanced data recovery software, including disk diagnostic and file repair, the best disk diagnostic tools, improved file type searching capabilities, and the confidence that your most important information is in good hands to be rescued.

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Deleted a photo from your computer or removed it from your digital camera? No problem! You can always restore lost pictures easily with Magic Photo Recovery!

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Today, most digital pictures and family photo albums are stored electronically on a computer. These electronic images are much more vulnerable than traditional paper albums. Images could disappear from your PC if the system is attacked by a virus. An entire photo album can be deleted or corrupted by faulty software. Digital pictures can disappear from a memory card if you remove it from the camera when it saves your most recent snapshot, or if the operating temperature is too hot or too cold for that particular memory card. Is this a problem? Not at all! You can always restore lost pictures easily with Magic Photo Recovery!

Magic Photo Recovery (http://www.magicuneraser.com/) recovers lost and deleted images completely automatically. An easy step-by-step wizard recovers digital pictures lost or deleted from hard disks, digital cameras, memory cards and a variety of storage media in a quick and effortless manner. Deleted a photo from your computer or removed it from your digital camera? No problem! Magic Photo Recovery will scan the entire disk or memory card to locate and recover every picture you deleted. Formatted a memory card or repartitioned the entire hard drive? No problem! Magic Photo Recovery recovers images from disks and flash cards even if they were repartitioned and reformatted several times. Magic Photo Recovery recovers images deleted from the Recycle Bin or lost after a system failure, reads pictures from formatted or corrupted memory cards, and can even recover digital pictures and RAW files directly from the camera!

The improved recovery algorithm carefully analyzes the entire disk or memory card sector by sector, locates lost or deleted digital images, and restores them onto the same or different media. Thanks to the new recovery method, Magic Photo Recovery can recover digital pictures that no other program can even see! The recovery algorithm featured in Magic Photo Recovery 2.0 carefully analyzes the file system, the disk and the recoverable images in order to determine the original names and locations of files being recovered.

Magic Photo Recovery is quick and easy to use. The convenient wizard guides you through the recovery process in a step-by-step manner. In fact, you can even recover your pictures by just clicking a single button! No prior experience with data recovery, and no special skills or outstanding technical abilities are needed. Just launch Magic Photo Recovery and see the magic!

Convenience features include a full-featured image browser and viewer, and the ability to filter recoverable images by their size, resolution or pixel dimensions.

Tired of empty promises? Tried of other recovery tools that only made things worse? Magic Photo Recovery features a complete full-size preview and a full-featured image browser that allows you to see the recoverable files before you make a purchase decision! Simply download the free evaluation version (http://www.magicuneraser.com/), and you will immediately realize the difference!

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SoftAmbulance for Outlook Express {undeletes|recovers} deleted {messages|email} quickly, easily and completely automatically.

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There are a number of things that can and do go wrong with your email when you use Outlook Express frequently. The cure to the problem depends on the cause. This guide explains causes of these problems and outines solutions to fix your Outlook Express mailboxes.

There are known bugs in Outlook Express, and there are other programs in Windows running at the same time as you use Outlook Express. An application crash or a system failure or a sudden power outage can cause corruption in the mail database used by Outlook Express. Mailbox corruption can also happen because of a hardware malfunction or as a result of a virus infection. One can unintentionally delete an important message from Deleted Item.

A known issue in Outlook Express limits the size of its mail database to 2 GB. If you use Outlook Express frequently and don’t put your mail to a number of different mailboxes, you’ll hit the limit sooner rather than later. When you do, Outlook Express will be unable to access its mail database, and will fail to access your messages.

Corrupted and inaccessible hard disks are also a problem. While you could just format the corrupted drive and continue using it without a problem, all data stored on it, including Outlook Express mail databases, would be lost.

In order to recover to your email messages, you have to repair the damaged mail database. SoftAmbulance for Outlook Express made by http://softambulance.com/ can repair Outlook Express mail databases no matter what caused the damage. Virus attacks and system failures, crashed Outlook Express and corrupted hard drives are not a problem. Even if you can’t access the drive, SoftAmbulance for Outlook Express can scan its surface sector by sector, locate, recover and repair corrupted Outlook Express databases.

In case of a message removed from Deleted Items, the fix is even simpler. When you erase a message from Deleted Items, it is not erased immediately. Instead, it is simply marked as erased; Outlook Express will not wipe or overwrite its content until the next scheduled compression is performed on its mail database. By default, Outlook Express only performs automatic database optimizations once every 100 runs or so; chances are high you’ll be able to recover the deleted email before the optimization takes place.

SoftAmbulance for Outlook Express recovers deleted email quickly, easily and completely automatically.

A free evaluation version of SoftAmbulance for Outlook Express is available for download at http://softambulance.com/download.php

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One of the most stressful times that a simple student or employee may encounter is a loss of an important file on the computer. It can be a day of doom if you are due to submit your paper or make a presentation and at the worst possible moment your file is deleted. Thus, data recovery may be the answer you are looking for. Data recovery is technology that will help you to salvage lost data. First things first, you may want to take out your rolodex and try calling your tech-sa…

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One of the most stressful times that a simple student or employee may encounter is a loss of an important file on the computer. It can be a day of doom if you are due to submit your paper or make a presentation and at the worst possible moment your file is deleted. Thus, data recovery may be the answer you are looking for. Data recovery is technology that will help you to salvage lost data. First things first, you may want to take out your rolodex and try calling your tech-savvy friends to help you out. In case you have no more choice, you just might have to spend a little bit to get yourself a data recovery software or a specialist to help you out.

1. Determine What’s Wrong:

- your computer will not start at all
- blue screen of death
- your computer boots up, but files are missing or are corrupted
- your computer opens up but you cannot seem to find some of your other drives

2. Weird Sounds

Before doing anything, try to hear if there are any sounds coming from your hard drive like a weird scratching, scraping or ticking. If you do hear something like it, then it is enough to conclude that your hardware may be physically damaged. The only possibility for you is to take your computer to a data recovery service where experts might be able to get your data off for you. Of course, this would entail a lot of time and money, so you may want to weigh the value of the data you lost before going a step further.

3. Do-It-Yourself Data Recovery Tips:

- Acquire and download software to help you out
- Not all software is free
- Attach your hard drive to another computer if your computer has only a single drive. This is to provide enough space to store all your data
- If your computer has a rollback safety feature, try and roll back to a previous saved state to restore damage

4. Possible Causes Of Damage:

- Lightning strike
- Virus
- Hard drive failure
- Accidental deletion of data
- Water/fire damage
- Improper software installation overwriting important data

5. Be Prepared – Make Backups

Having back-ups is the only solution to your data loss problems. They come in various forms:

- Virus protection software
- Personal firewall
- CD backup
- DVD backup
- RAID hard drive

6. Back-Up Tips

- Try investing in backup software of good quality and performance. Products that leave you secured from data loss disaster or further computer file crashes are always a good investment.
- Double check the restore capability. The software should have features that guarantee that while the product is performing your back up it checks all the data down to the level of bits and bytes.
- Double check the capability of your back up medium. Invest on the best back up software you can get and at the same time, for the purposes of prevention, start manually and diligently backing up your data regularly.
- Do an inspection of your hard drives from time to time. Always be on guard of viruses and spywares that can possibly crash your hardware. Defrag your computer regularly to correct errors and check bad sectors as soon as they are detected.
- Be sure you conduct a proper documentation of what transpired during the data loss disaster, what you have observed, as it progresses and the things you attempted doing to give your files the first aid. This will help the data recovery expert to track the problem and recommend the best solution for your problem.

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An article about survivable computer systems, high availability, fault tolerance, and events such as attacks, accidents, and failures that can cause computer systems to fail

Keywords:
Survivable Computer Systems, Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Fault Tolerance, High Availability

Definition Of A Survivable Computer System
—————————-
A computer system, which may be made up of multiple individual systems and components, designed to provide mission critical services must be able to perform in a consistent and timely manner under various operating conditions. It must be able to meet its goals and objectives whether it is in a state of normal operation or under some sort of stress or in a hostile environment. A discussion on survivable computer systems can be a very complex and far reaching one. However, in this article we will touch on just a few of the basics.

Computer Security And Survivable Computer Systems
————————————————–
Survivable computer systems and computer security are in many ways related but at a low-level very much different. For instance, the hardening of a particular system to be resistant against intelligent attacks may be a component of a survivable computer system. It does not address the ability of a computer system to fulfill its purpose when it is impacted by an event such as a deliberate attack, natural disaster or accident, or general failure. A survivable computer system must be able to adapt, perform its primary critical functions even if in a hostile environment, even if various components of the computer system are incapacitated. In some cases, even if the entire “primary” system has been destroyed.

As an example; a system designed to provide real-time critical information regarding analysis of specialized medications ceases to function for a few hours because of wide spread loss of communication. However, it maintains the validity of the data when communication is restored and systems come back online. This computer system could be considered to have survived under conditions outside of its control.

On the other hand, the same system fails to provide continuous access to information under normal circumstances or operating environment, because of a localized failure, may not be judged to have fulfilled its purpose or met its objective.

Fault Tolerant And Highly Availability Computer Systems
—————————-
Many computer systems are designed with fault tolerant components so they continue to operate when key portions of the system fail. For instance; multiple power supplies, redundant disk drives or arrays, even multiple processors and system boards that can continue to function even if its peer component is destroyed or fails. The probability of all components designed to be redundant failing at one time may be quite low. However, a malicious entity that knows how the redundant components are configured may be able to engineer critical failures across the board rendering the fault tolerant components ineffective.

High availability also plays a role in a survivable computer system. However this design component may not maintain computer system survivability during certain events such as various forms of malicious attack . An example of this might be a critical web service that has been duplicated, say across multiple machines, to allow continuous functionality if one or more the individual web servers was to fail. The problem is that many implementations of high availability use the same components and methodology on all of the individual systems. If an intelligent attack or malicious event takes place and is directed at a specific set of vulnerabilities on one of the individual systems, it is reasonable to assume the remaining computer systems that participate in the highly available implementation are also susceptible to the same or similar vulnerabilities. A certain degree of variance must be achieved in how all systems participate in the highly available implementation.

What’s The Difference Between An Attack, Failure, And Accident?
How Do These Differences Impact A Survivable Computer System
———————————————————-
In many cases when I am discussing the security of systems with customers, the question of business continuity and disaster recovery come up. Most companies that provide a service that they deem critical just know the system needs to be operational in a consistent manner. However, there is typically little discussion about the various events or scenarios surrounding this and that can lead to great disappointment in the future when what the customer thought was a “survivable computer system” does not meet their expectations. Some of the items I like to bring up during these conversations is what their computer systems goal and objective is, what specifically does continuous operation mean to them, and specifically what constitutes an attack, failure, or accident that can cause loss of operation or failure to meet objectives.

A failure may be defined as a localized event that impacts the operation of a system and its ability to deliver services or meet its objectives. An example might be the failure of one or more critical or non-critical functions that effect the performance or overall operation of the system. Say, the failure of a module of code that causes a cascading event that prevents redundant modules from performing properly. Or, a localize hardware failure that incapacitates the computer system.

An accident is typically an event that is outside the control of the system and administrators of a local / private system. An example of this would be natural disasters such as hurricanes, if you live in south Florida like I do, or floods, or wide spread loss of power because the utility provider cut the wrong power lines during an upgrade to the grid. About two years ago, a client of mine who provides web based document management services could not deliver revenue generating services to their customers because a telecommunications engineer cut through a major phone trunk six blocks away from their office. They lost phone and data services for nearly a week.

An now we come to “attack”. We all know accidents will happen, we know that everything fails at one time or another, and typically we can speculate on how these things will happen. An attack, executed by an intelligent, experienced individual or group can be very hard to predict. There are many well known and documented forms of attacks. The problem is intelligence and human imagination continuously advance the form of malicious attacks and can seriously threaten even the most advanced designed survivable computer systems. An accident or failure does not have the ability to think out of the box or realize that a highly available design is flawed because all participants use the same design. The probability that an attack might occur, and succeed may be quite low, but the impact may be devastating.

Conclusion
———————————————–
One of the reasons I wrote this article was to illustrate that it’s not all about prevention. Although prevention is a big part of survivable computer system design, a critical computer system must be able to meet its objectives even when operating under hostile or stressful circumstances. Or if the steps taking for prevention ultimately prove inadequate. It may be impossible to think of all the various events that can impact a critical computer system but it is possible to reasonably define the possibilities.

The subject of survivable computer systems is actually one of complexity and ever evolving technology. This article has only touched on a few of the basic aspects of computer system survivability. I intend on continuing this article to delve deeper into the subject of survivable computer systems.

You may reprint or publish this article free of charge as long as the bylines are included.

Original URL (The Web version of the article)
————
http://www.defendingthenet.com/NewsLetters/WhatAreSurvivableComputerSystems.htm

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Data recovery is the most useful and by far the best way to retrieve data that has been lost or deleted from a hard drive. Hard drive recovery can restore files that have been lost, no matter what the cause may be.

Keywords:
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Data recovery is the most useful and by far the best way to retrieve data that has been lost or deleted from a hard drive. Hard drive recovery can restore files that have been lost, no matter what the cause may be. From viruses to crashes, data recovery can restore the files on your hard drive by rebuilding the platters and the structure of the drive. Before you hard drive can be rebuilt, it must be evaluated. The evaluation process will give the technician a chance to go through your hard drive, determine what caused the failure, and what they need to do to restore your data. This is a very extensive process that involving a series of steps performed by the technician.

First things first, the technician must determine if the problem is logical, physical, or possibly a combination of both. Physical failures result in hardware malfunctions, while the logical problems lie in the software. Once the technician has found the problem and the cause, he can plan out the repair process and what he needs to do to recover the information.

If the technician is able to gain access into the hard drive, he or she will then create a mirrored image of the drive and continue the process. The data structure will come next, where the technician will determine just how much of the data can be saved. This step in the evaluation can be the most time consuming, as the technician or technicians will have to go through each sector step by step and located what data can be retrieved and what data cannot be retrieved.

Once the evaluation process has been completed, the results will be given to you. The technician will normally go over everything with you, and explain the options you have available. This is where they will discuss pricing, as well as how long it will take. They will also let you know how much data can be retrieved, and what they think caused the problem. In the rare occasion that no data can be retrieved, the technician will tell you that nothing can be done for your hard drive. Keep in mind that before they do anything to retrieve data, they will always contact you first to find out what you want to do.

Normally, most data can be retrieved in as little as 48 hours. The evaluation process may take a few days, as it is more time consuming and planned out than the actual data recovery process. The evaluation process can take longer depending on the parts that are needed, or if other technicians need to be involved with the process. If the technician has all of the necessary parts on hand and the experience, it normally doesn’t take long.

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Fix WinRAR archives tool. Helps recover data from damaged *.rar files and self extracted archives.

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A great number of our customers use file compression on a daily basis. RAR archiver is very popular and it is often used, when sending large files within your local network or outside.

However, in some cases it is safer to send unpacked files, because file compression is not always stable and this way of forwarding files may lead to their corruption. If you have just downloaded a file of RAR format and you see an error or corrupt rar, when trying to open this document, you may need Recovery Toolbox for RAR.

This rar repair tool helps, when users are unable to download large files one more time due to any reason, for example, when your Internet traffic is limited. Moreover, you may need a single document from the whole archive, that is why, redownload is irrational. The program for rar repair, fix rar and repair rar works with all tools, that can create files of RAR format, all compression rates are supported. Your archive may be protected with a password, it is unimportant, password-protected files are easily processed. Please note, that Recovery Toolbox for RAR is not a crack of any kind, users should enter the password, when opening compressed files, you are not allowed to use Recovery Toolbox for RAR for illegal purposes. Recovery Toolbox for RAR will easily extract documents, if it is possible. In some rare cases, RAR archives may be seriously damaged, it may lead to impossibility for Recovery Toolbox for RAR to retrieve some files from corrupted documents of RAR format. Do not hesitate to drop us an email, if something about rar fix, repair rar file or fix rar file is not clear, we welcome feedback with regard to rar recovery software and rar fix tool from our customers.

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The article classifies types of private data stored in Internet Explorer, analyses Internet Explorer password recovery programs, and give us some examples of recovering lost Internet passwords.

Keywords:
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Recovering Internet Explorer Passwords: Theory and Practice

1. Introduction
2. Types of passwords stored in Internet Explorer
2.1. Internet Credentials
2.2. AutoComplete data
2.3. AutoComplete passwords
2.4. FTP passwords
2.5. Synchronization passwords
2.6. Identities passwords
2.7. AutoForms data
2.8. Content Advisor password
3. Brief overview of Internet Explorer password recovery programs
4. PIEPR – the first acquaintance
5. Three real-life examples
5.1. Recovering current user’s FTP passwords
5.2. Recovering website passwords from unloadable operating system
5.3. Recovering uncommonly stored passwords
6. Conclusion

1. Introduction
Nobody will likely dispute the fact that Internet Explorer is today’s most popular Web browser. According to the statistics, approximately 70% of online users prefer to use just this program. Arguments about its pros and cons may last forever; still, this browser is the leader of its industry, and this is a fact that requires no proof. Internet Explorer carries several built-in technologies, designed to make average user’s life easier. One of them – IntelliSense – is made for taking care of the routine tasks, like the automatic completion of visited webpage addresses, automatic filling of form fields, users’ passwords, etc.

Many of today’s websites require registration, which means, user would have to enter user name and password. If you use more than a dozen of such websites, you will likely need a password manager. All modern browsers have a built-in password manager in their arsenal, and Internet Explorer is not an odd. Indeed, why would one have to remember yet another password if it is going to be forgotten some time soon anyway? Much easier would be to have browser do the routine work of remembering and storing passwords for you. It’s convenient and comfortable.

This would be a totally perfect solution; however, if your Windows operating system crashed or reinstalled not the way it’s supposed to be reinstalled, you can easily lose the entire list of your precious passwords. That’s the toll for the comfort and convenience. It’s good just about every website has a saving ‘I forgot password’ button. However, this button will not always take your headache from you.

Each software developer solves the forgotten password recovery problem their own way. Some of them officially recommend copying a couple of important files to another folder, while other send all registered users a special utility that allows managing the migration of private data, and the third ones pretend they are not seeing the problem. Nevertheless, the demand creates the offer, and password recovery programs are currently on a great demand.

In this article, let’s try to classify types of private data stored in Internet Explorer, look at programs for the recovery of the data, and study real-life examples of recovering lost Internet passwords.

2. Types of passwords stored in Internet Explorer
- Internet Explorer may store the following types of passwords:
- Internet Credentials
- AutoComplete Data
- AutoComplete Passwords
- FTP Passwords
- Synchronization Passwords for cached websites
- Identities Passwords
- AutoForms Data
- Content Advisor Password
Let’s take a closer look at each listed item.

2.1. Internet Credentials for websites
Internet credentials mean user’s logins and passwords required for accessing certain websites, which are processed by the wininet.dll library. For example, when you try to enter the protected area of a website, you may see the following user name and password prompt (fig.1 http://www.passcape.com/images/ie01.png).

If the option ‘Remember my password’ is selected in that prompt, the user credentials will be saved to your local computer. The older versions of Windows 9a stored that data in user’s PWL file; Windows 2000 and newer store it in the Protected Storage.

2.2. AutoComplete Data
AutoComplete data (passwords will be covered further) are also stored in the Protected Storage and appear as lists of HTML form field names and the corresponding user data. For example, if an HTML page contains an e-mail address entry dialog: once user has entered his e-mail address, the Protected Storage will have the HTML field name, the address value, and the time the record was last accessed.

The HTML page title and website address are not stored. Is that good or bad? It’s difficult to determine; more likely to be good than bad. Here are the obvious pros: it saves free space and speeds up browser’s performance. If you think the last note is insignificant, try to imagine how you would have to perform several extra checkups in a multi-thousand (this is not as rare as it may seem to be) auto-fill list.

Another obvious plus is that data for identical by name (and often by subject) HTML form fields will be stored in the same place, and the common data will be used for the automatic filling of such pages. We will see this by this example. If one HTML page contains an auto-fill field with the name ‘email’, and user entered his e-mail address in that field, IE will put in the storage, roughly, ‘email=my@email.com’. From now on, if the user opens another website, which has a page with the same field name ‘email’, the user will be suggested to auto-fill it with the value that he entered on the first page (my@email.com). Thus, the browser somewhat discovers AI capabilities within itself.

The major drawback of this data storage method comes out of its advantage that we just described. Imagine, user has entered auto-fill data on a webpage. If someone knows the HTML form field name, that person can create his own simplest HTML page with the same field name and open it from a local disk. To uncover the data entered in this field, such person will not even have to connect to the Internet and open the original WWW address.

2.3. AutoComplete Passwords
In the case with passwords data, however, as you might have guessed, the data will not be filled in automatically. Since auto-complete passwords are stored along with the Web page name, and each password is bound to only one specific HTML page.

In the new version, Internet Explorer 7, both AutoComplete passwords and data are encrypted completely different; the new encryption method is free from the shortcoming just described (if that can be classified as a shortcoming.)

It is worth noticing that Internet Explorer allows users to manage auto-fill parameters manually, through the options menu (fig.2 http://www.passcape.com/images/ie02.png).

2.4. FTP passwords
FTP site passwords are stored pretty much the same way. It would be relevant to notice that beginning with Windows XP FTP passwords are additionally encrypted with DPAPI. This encryption method uses logon password. Naturally, this makes it much more difficult to recover such lost passwords manually, since now one would need to have the user’s Master Key, SID and the account password.

Starting with Microsoft Windows 2000, the operating system began to provide a Data Protection Application-Programming Interface (DPAPI) API. This is simply a pair of function calls that provide OS-level data protection services to user and system processes. By OS-level, we mean a service that is provided by the operating system itself and does not require any additional libraries. By data protection, we mean a service that provides confidentiality of data through encryption. Since the data protection is part of the OS, every application can now secure data without needing any specific cryptographic code other than the necessary function calls to DPAPI. These calls are two simple functions with various options to modify DPAPI behavior. Overall, DPAPI is a very easy-to-use service that will benefit developers that must provide protection for sensitive application data, such as passwords and private keys.
DPAPI is a password-based data protection service: it requires a password to provide protection. The drawback, of course, is that all protection provided by DPAPI rests on the password provided. This is offset by DPAPI using proven cryptographic routines, specifically the strong Triple-DES and AES algorithms, and strong keys, which we’ll cover in more detail later. Since DPAPI is focused on providing protection for users and requires a password to provide this protection, it logically uses the user’s logon password for protection.
DPAPI is not responsible for storing the confidential information it protects. It is only responsible for encrypting and decrypting data for programs that call it, such as Windows Credential manager, the Private Key storage mechanism, or any third-party programs.
Please refer to Microsoft Web site for more information.

2.5. Synchronization Passwords for cached websites
Synchronization passwords free user from having to enter passwords for cached websites (sites set to be available offline.) Passwords of this type are also stored in IE’s Protected Storage.

2.6. Identities passwords
So are identities passwords. The identity-based access management mechanism is not widespread in Microsoft’s products, except, perhaps, Outlook Express.

2.7. AutoForms Data
A special paragraph must cover the form auto-fill method, which constitutes a hybrid way of storing data. This method stores the actual data in the Protected Storage, and the URL, which the data belong to, is stored in user’s registry. The URL written in the registry is stored not as plaintext – it is stored as hash. Here is the algorithm for reading form auto-fill data in IE 4 – 6:

===8RemoveAll();

//Check if autoform passwords are present in registry
if ( EntryPresent(cszUrl) )
{
//Read PStore autoform passwords
return PStoreReadAutoformPasswords(cszUrl,saPasswords);
}

return FALSE;
}

//Check if autoform passwords are present
BOOL CAutoformDecrypter::EntryPresent(LPCTSTR cszUrl)
{
assert(cszUrl);

DWORD dwRet, dwValue, dwSize=sizeof(dwValue);
LPCTSTR cszHash=GetHash(cszUrl);

//problems computing the hash
if ( !cszHash )
return FALSE;

//Check the registry
dwRet=SHGetValue(HKCU,_T(”Software\\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\IntelliForms\\SPW”),cszHash,NULL,&dwValue,&dwSize);
delete((LPTSTR)cszHash);

if ( dwRet==ERROR_SUCCESS )
return TRUE;

m_dwLastError=E_NOTFOUND;
return FALSE;
}

//retrieve hash by given URL text and translate it into hex format
LPCTSTR CAutoformDecrypter::GetHash(LPCTSTR cszUrl)
{
assert(cszUrl);

BYTE buf[0x10];
LPTSTR pRet=NULL;
int i;

if ( HashData(cszUrl,buf,sizeof(buf)) )
{
//Allocate some space
pRet=new TCHAR [sizeof(buf) * sizeof(TCHAR) + sizeof(TCHAR)];
if ( pRet)
{
for ( i=0; i0 )
pHash[dw]=(BYTE)dw;

//actual hashing stuff
while ( dwDataSize–>0 )
{
for ( dw=dwHashSize; dw–>0; )
{
//m_pPermTable = permutation table
pHash[dw]=m_pPermTable[pHash[dw]^pData[dwDataSize]];
}
===8

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Many people think that offsite data backup and online storage solutions are the same solution. Please read this article to find out the differences enabling you to make an informed choice.

Keywords:
data backup, offsite backup, remote backup, online storage, internet backup, backup, backup

Most people still think that backing up to an offsite environment is the same solution as moving files to an online storage system. If you want to know what the differences are, so you are able to make an informed decision, please read on.

Online file storage is a means for moving your digital photos, music, movies and projects off your computer via the internet to a remote storage facility, so you can access them from anywhere, share them with friends. Online file storage works by giving you and thousands of other people storage space on large internet servers. This storage is basically used as an extension to your local storage.

A typical example of use would be anybody how has non-critical data such as MP3, MPG, JPEG files who would wish to store data remotely in case of drive failure or loss and may also wish to share said files with friends. Please note this form of data storage is for file data only and would require manual transfer via ftp. Online storage is ideal for a home user looking to secure or store data offsite.

Offsite Backup is a commercial offering, originally used buy large corporate organizations who could afford high bandwidth connections ensuring their data is backed up to third party locations with highest emphasis placed upon security. As the cost of internet connectivity has greatly reduced, offsite secure backup services have become available to smaller businesses. I am sure you can appreciate, if a company, business or organization was to lose data, it would not know who its customers are, who owes money to whom, therefore creating many more challenges than a home user losing their MP3 collection would face.

It is not just an issue of moving file data to a remote location, there are many other factors a company has to address, such as:

What type of data has to be backed up – most companies will have a database in one form or another such as, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL, MySQL, Oracle or Lotus Notes which will be running 24 hours a day. A backup solution must contain agents for backing up the databases in question whilst the database is running and must support multiple operating systems, such as Windows, Novel, Linux and Unix etc.

Security – The data to be backed up is “sensitive” and you would certainly not wish to share this data. Before data is backed up it must be encrypted to the highest levels possible, levels used by your bank or the military for example. Your data must be stored whilst still in the encrypted state ensuring only you have access.

Data Backup can create a large manpower overhead, so your offsite solution must be totally automated requiring no human intervention, set and forget.

The hardware must be dedicated for backup and resilient as possible with no single points of failure and then for good measure this whole infrastructure must be replicated in real time to a second datacenter.

All the above factors will ensure your business data is backed up and available for restore regardless of data disaster.

In summary, online storage, great for home users storing MP3, Video and file data. Offsite data backup is a must for business use.

To find out more information about secure offsite data backup solutions, please visit

www.perfectbackup.co.uk

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SoftAmbulance Partition Doctor is a perfect data recovery tool for the rest of us. Deleted files, corrupted data, lost documents and broken file systems no longer a problem!

Keywords:
data recovery, undelete, file recovery, fix corrupted data, data corruption, corrupt partition, formatted partition, fix hard drive, disk repair

Deleted files? Corrupted documents? Lost data? Call for SoftAmbulance! No need to wait for even a minute – download your copy right now and fix your disk problem in just seconds! SoftAmbulance Partition Doctor is designed for people like you and I – no programming skills or hi-tech geekness required.

Deleting a document by accident is easy. That can happen to anyone, and happens regularly to everyone who’s using their computer for anything but computer games. Thanks to the intuitive, easy-to-use interface of Microsoft Windows, it is now very easy to format a hard disk. The problem is, how do you un-format it? The all-mighty and user-friendly Windows won’t do anything about it.

Even if you are extra-cautious and don’t usually click “OK” when asked to agree with the total loss of your data, data corruption and hard drive crashes tend to happen regardless. Sometimes the corruption is so severe that you cannot even access your disk or partition, let alone read your files.

Did you experience a hard drive failure? No access to disks or partitions? Suspecting virus attack or hardware failure? Stop messing around and call for an ambulance! SoftAmbulance Partition Doctor restores your hard drives health and cures your files and data completely automatically. It won’t require you to read any “Data Recovery for Dummies” books or take a college class learning how to fix your PC. SoftAmbulance Partition Doctor will just ask you which disk or what files you need recovered, and works completely automatically after that, pursuing complete restoration of corrupt files and data.

Under the hood SoftAmbulance Partition Doctor has a complex and powerful data recovery engine. It’s not just another free undelete tool or a clone of Windows check-disk. Being a much more complex and way more robust recovery product, SoftAmbulance Partition Doctor combines check-disk and undelete functionality, but does it much better and more reliably. Instead of relying on the possibly corrupted file system to find deleted files, SoftAmbulance Partition Doctor scans the entire hard drive surface to locate every file that can be restored. It’s designed to rescue as much data as possible even if your hard drive went amuck and file system is barely breathing.

SoftAmbulance Partition Doctor is a perfect data recovery tool for the rest of us. A simple, intuitive wizard guides you through entire recovery process by asking you multiple-choice questions. It’s not a math exam, not even an algebra test! Just select the damaged disk or the drive that contains deleted files to recover, and SoftAmbulance Partition Doctor will start working on that drive automatically. Deleted files, corrupted data, lost documents and broken file systems not a problem with SoftAmbulance Partition Doctor. Download your copy right now from http://www.softambulance.com/

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There are many companies now offering offsite backup services. Please do not choose your supplier based on price alone. Remember your data is your companies most important asset.

Keywords:
offsite backup, data backup, online backup, remote backup, internet backup, online storage

The concept of offsite data backup is not new; some time ago it was only available to corporate institutions that had multiple locations, high connectivity speeds and very high budgets. Today the cost of hardware and high speed connectivity has greatly reduced, as a result the number of companies offering backup to a remote location has greatly increased. For purposes of conversation, we can call it jumping on the band wagon.

You may think the increased competition is good for the consumer, to an extent, I agree, but not at the cost of cutting corners and jeopardising the security of your data. We all know and agree a company’s data is its most important asset, and to lose or give access to your competition such an asset is never an option. So please be careful where you store your data.

The general idea of offsite backup is a good one, after all it has a very low proportionate implementation cost and as the correct system should be completely automated the cost of ownership is also very low as well. Unlike tape backup it is also very scalable, you can start small and grow into larger solutions as and when you require with zero disruption but you have to be with the right offsite backup company in the first place.

In today’s data centric environment even smaller companies may have more than one server, just for example a server for Microsoft Exchange/Lotus Notes, a server for Microsoft SQL/Oracle/MySQL and potentially a file and print server, or maybe a single server which carries out all tasks. Smaller companies may still use older inherited Unix based or Novell based systems or may be considering migrating to a lower cost Linux environment. Whet ever you currently use or what you may use in the future your offsite backup solution will need to adapt. Please check, what ever backup company you use, make sure they are always developing their products for the future, your companies future.

Getting data to an offsite location is the easy bit, anybody can click and drag to an ftp site, to optimise your backup and more importantly your recovery times make sure your data is compressed locally or at source. The most important element of any data transfer is security, make sure your data is encrypted before it is transmitted and remains encrypted whilst in storage if this is the case only your organisation will have access to your data.

In what environment is your data stored? There is no point just moving your most important asset to another location, make sure it is totally safe, data should only be backed up to a class 1 data centre with the highest security and safety measures in place, hardware should be clustered so there is no single point of failure within that data centre and for added security and peace of mind the whole data centre and hardware within should be a replicated in real time to a second location in preferably another country.

Imagine your local data backed up every night or when ever you wish to a secure remote location in the UK and then replicated in real-time to a second data centre in a different country.
Finally this whole process must be as efficient as possible. It must be totally secure, fully automated ensuring your staff are focussed on revenue generating functions, it must support open files enabling you to backup regardless of what your systems are doing and it must be capable of incremental backups, after all there is no point re-transmitting a file which has not been accessed for a year.

So after reading this article I now hope it has made you think and understand why the cheapest offsite backup solution is rarely the best.

To find out more information about secure offsite data backup solutions, please visit

www.perfectbackup.co.uk

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If you have accidentally formatted a hard drive or partition, you will get an empty disk with no files on it. Don’t consider your files lost just yet! You can still recover all of your original files complete with the original directory structure.

Keywords:
formatted disk, formatted partition

If you have accidentally formatted a hard drive or partition, you will get an empty disk with no files on it. Don’t consider your files lost just yet! If you didn’t put any new files on the formatted partition, you can easily recover all of your original files complete with the original directory structure by using widely available un-format tools that are often available for free. But there is a good chance to recover the formatted partition even if you saved a few files on it, or even installed Windows onto it! Just don’t attempt running a free un-format tool at this stage, as it will most probably just destroy what’s been left of your files.

How is this even possible? To answer this question, I have to cover the way the formatting works. If you are in a rush to recover your work, skip this section completely and go to the recovery software recommendation part.

Windows needs to format your disks in order to prepare it for keeping data such as files and folders. When Windows formats a disk, it does not wipe off its entire contents as you might believe judging from the time it takes to complete the formatting. Instead, it simply creates new, empty file system records at the beginning of the disk. The lengthy time is spent on checking the disk for errors to ensure that every sector on the disk can read and write correctly, marking the bad ones in the file system. Once again, unless you perform a low-level format from the system BIOS (and you’ll never do that), all the original information is left intact on the hard disk. The formatted disk appears blank because there is no record in the newly created file system about the files and directories that were originally stored on that disk.

There are two approaches to recovering the formatted disks. The first approach is employed by the many free un-format utilities that simply return the original file system in place of a new one. This approach works if you have just formatted the disk and didn’t write anything onto it; if you formatted the disk with the same type of file system (FAT or NTFS), and if you used the same cluster size. You have to meet all of these conditions in order for the free tools to work. Otherwise, you’ll get something worse than an empty disk: a corrupted one.

If you weren’t that careful when choosing the matching parameters to format your disk, you have no choice but the second type of recovery software: the data recovery tools. Before you begin installing data recovery software, please note that you don’t want to write anything onto the disk you are about to recover. So be careful not to save the data recovery product onto that disk, and not to install it there. Otherwise, you are taking the risk of overwriting your original files.

If your original file system (not the new one!) was NTFS, download and install 1st NTFS Recovery from http://ntfs-recovery.com, run the installed application and select the formatted partition when prompted. That’s it! 1st NTFS Recovery will take care of the rest.

Is it that simple? In a word, yes. 1st NTFS Recovery scans the formatted disk looking for files. It has special algorithms to detect Office documents, digital pictures, ZIP and RAR archives, so your chances of getting back the valuable stuff are pretty high.

After 1st NTFS Recovery is done with recovering your files, it proceeds to restoring the formatted disk to its original state. You don’t have to do anything but click the Next button on a disk recovery wizard!

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Why compact discs get damaged. Compact discs are all plastic. Compact discs are even not sensitive to magnetic fields as in case floppy disks, which never used to retain data when even a slight magnetic field is crossed with floppies. Then what is the reason why CDs get corrupted?

Keywords:
VOIP Singapore, Voice over Internet protocol,IP PA System, Systems Integration, Computer Telephony, Voicemail

Why compact discs get damaged. Compact discs are all plastic. Compact discs are even not sensitive to magnetic fields as in case floppy disks, which never used to retain data when even a slight magnetic field is crossed with floppies. Then what is the reason why CDs get corrupted?

CDs work on the principle of reflection of light. CD drives have a built in laser that is used to read data. When laser is focused on to the CD the beam get reflected to a point when there is some data on that are i.e. 0 or 1 the points where light beam lands back is different which symbolizes the bit value.

When something on the CD breaks the path of the laser light, something like dust particle or something else like a FINGER PRINT!!!. Finger prints are nothing but natural oil from skin that sticks to the surface in contact with the skin in a pattern of skin cells. This oil or say fingerprint helps in refraction of light and loss of data to the reading source i.e. laser.

When CDs don’t run the reason is because something is interrupting the laser to read the shinny side of the CD. But I have important data what should I do now?

Most of the times it is because of dust or fingerprints, you need to clean the CD.
You can clean your CDs with plain water or a bit soapy water. And it is better to clean the CDs after some time. But this doesn’t mean you should start putting your CDs in dishwasher or washing machine every week.

All you need to do is to wipe the shinny side of the CD with a clean moist cloth and try running it again make sure the CD is dry before you run it.

People say about using all different sorts of things to clean CDs like toothpastes, wax polish etc. but I would recommend you to buy some CD cleaning kit. But if you still want to go try, do let me know the results.

And one thing I must add is that DVD work on the same principle and are bit more sensitive to dust and fingerprints. You can also use the above mentioned procedure for DVDs. But you need to be careful with DVDs

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I’m currently in the process of installing Windows Vista on a test machine in order to study the new file system Microsoft is releasing. To share this information with you, I will be writing various articles revealing all of my findings. This is the first of a very promising series of articles written from the perspective of a professional Data Recovery engineer.

Keywords:
Data Recovery Windows Future Storage File System Kepler WinFS

Hi friends, let’s talk this time about the new concept in file manager that will be introduced by Microsoft in its new Operating system Windows Vista. The name of this new file administration is “WinFS”.

WinFS is a new file system that it’s being developed by Microsoft to be used in its new operating system Windows Vista. At the begining this name means Windows Future Storage, but now is only Windows File System. Acctually, there is no clear information about what “WinFS” is. Some people say that is a complete new file system and others say that WinFS is only an extension of the actual system because many of the file system work is done by NTFS.

Necessity
With the evolution of Internet and the information technologies, working with big volumes of information has increasingly become more common. Hard disks represent the first half of the storage for personal information. They are commonly used to store personal contacts, work documents, etc. These information items usually keep certain relationship levels among them. So, when you work with a large number of these items, it is very important to organize them and provide a flexible search mechanism based on their properties and content.

Architecture
WinFS is a storage platform to organize, search and share a wide diversity of information.
Instead of a traditional tree in NTFS to organize information, WinFS uses a direct acyclic graph of items (DAG). It is a set of stored items and their relationships whose physical storage is a relational database providing support to store any item hierarchy. Now it is possible to find items according to the value of their properties and even to the value of the properties of items related to them.The data-sharing capacities of WinFS come with a set of services such us synchronization, notification, a unified store and a common security model. The integration of these services to other technologies like Active Directory makes it possible for applications to share data in a flexible way.

Conclusions
WinFS data model expresses a set of modern storage concepts featuring a combination of the file system services and the relational system to provide a new powerful and enhancing storage platform. This actually elevates the file system conception to a higher level. The WinFS Item may be expressed in XML, object-oriented or tabular manner which allows the WinFS functionalities to be used in a variety of heterogeneous environments. In addition to this, WinFS features a powerful API to develop applications that use its potentialities. Due to its conception WinFS data model represents a step forward in the evolution of file systems and even of storage platforms.

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Accent OFFICE Password Recovery can recover passwords protecting Microsoft Office documents and can do it fast…no matter how complex your password was.

Keywords:
word password recovery,excel password recovery,office password recovery,break word password,break excel password,break office password,crack password,unlock protected document,unlock protected spreadsheet,remove password,disable password,recover password

What Professionals Use to Recover Microsoft Office Passwords
The Microsoft Office Application Suite has dominated the market for many years. The suite offers a complete set of tools for the most demanding computer users, but there is one essential tool missing.
Microsoft Office documents can be protected against unauthorized access and saved with a password. While these documents are surely protected against unauthorized use, what about accessing them legitimately when one forgets or loses the password? This is not a hypothetical question, as many people forget passwords they used just a week ago, let alone a year ago. Even more often, a new employee trying to open Office documents finds out that the passwords are not available.
The one essential tool that is missing from the Microsoft Office suite is a password recovery tool. Microsoft might have had legitimate reasons not to provide such tools, but the problem screams for a solution. Lost passwords can mean just a headache for absent-minded individuals, but can cause serious financial trouble for many organizations.
The demand is there, and the supply has followed. There is no lack of password recovery services and third-party software tools to handle password-protected documents. There are certain pros and cons to both approaches.
Password recovery services can do a great job, providing fast recovery of your lost passwords. But are they worth the price they charge, if you are a home user trying to unlock your year-old CV? And can you trust your corporate documentation to even reputable third parties? If the answer is negative, you are a potential user of dedicated software tools that work off-line on your own computer.
Such software can take longer to recover your passwords, but you won’t pay outrageous prices and you don’t share your trade secrets with a third party. And personal software is really not that slow! Chances are that your password can be recovered in an instant. You’ll be using the same software used by password recovery professionals but on your own computer.

What You Can Use to Recover Microsoft Office Passwords like a Professional
Meet Accent OFFICE Password Recovery (http://passwordrecoverytools.com/), a tool that’s used by password recovery specialists. More importantly, it’s the tool that can recover your password and do it fast:no matter how complex your password was.
Accent OFFICE Password Recovery can easily access many documents. To make a long story short, not all Microsoft Office documents are equally well-protected. Certain versions and certain types of passwords can be broken instantly without the need of long password-crunching routines. How can you tell if your documents fall into this category? Download a free copy of Accent OFFICE Password Recovery from http://passwordrecoverytools.com/ to see if your password can be instantly removed.
What if your document was encrypted with a strong password and cannot be recovered instantly? If so, Accent OFFICE Password Recovery will try different passwords until it finds one that fits. Modern computers are fast, so fast that hundreds of thousands of different passwords can be tried every second. Your typical “123″ password will be cracked in no time!
What if your company policies mandate having longer than normal passwords? In that case, it may take longer. How much longer? That depends on what you remember about the password.
Typical password recovery applications use two methods to guess passwords. The first one to try is always a dictionary attack, which attempts combinations of different words from plain English or other languages. There are not that many words in any language, which allows this attack to attempt all possible combinations quickly. If your password did not contain dictionary words, a password recovery tool will typically use the so-called brute force attack, attempting every possible combination of letters, numbers, and special symbols as a suggested password. This approach can take days or even weeks, if you had a really long password!
Accent OFFICE Password Recovery may solve the puzzle much faster than typical tools by using a third approach. If you remember something – even a little bit – about your password, Accent OFFICE Password Recovery can use this information to restrict the number of possible combinations and recover your password much faster than usual. This approach, which is unique to Accent OFFICE Password Recovery, is called masking. You can define the mask used in your password in an easy visual manner. Are you certain that your password started with a capital letter? Define a mask using that restriction, and Accent OFFICE Password Recovery won’t attempt any lower-case characters, making password recovery twice as fast. Did your password end with a number? Add another mask and your time savings are three-fold. Does your corporate policy demand passwords longer than 7 characters? Accent OFFICE Password Recovery won’t try passwords shorter than that, and you gain even more time.
Accent OFFICE Password Recovery provides you with an easy Wizard that helps you create a custom attack on your password, ensuring the fastest turnaround for the most complex passwords.
Accent OFFICE Password Recovery is not your typical “do-it-yourself” tool aimed at the occasional user who forgot a password that happens to be “123″. This product is designed to effectively crunch and solve passwords that are much more complex, and it does it fast. In fact, it can recover many passwords in just seconds! Download a free evaluation version today at: http://passwordrecoverytools.com/

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Shareware software for a recovering damaged Microsoft Excel files versions 97/2000/XP/2003/2007 (*.xls, *.xlsx, *.xlt, *.xltx, *.xlm, *.xlmx files).

Keywords:
repair Excel file, excel repair tool, excel file repair, repair excel, excel fix, repair Excel files

The information, stored in Microsoft Excel, may be valuable, therefore, you should protect it. Very often, Microsoft Excel worksheets contain tables, reports, diagrams and other critical documents. We believe, that such documents should not be lost, otherwise, it may provoke serious losses. Recovery Toolbox for Excel helps to avoid losses, if you could not prevent the corruption of worksheets.

Recovery Toolbox for Excel can restore Microsoft Excel even after virus infections, but, you should not lose time, the process of data recovery must be started without delays. Recovery Toolbox for Excel cannot guarantee, that all columns and images will be restored, but, you have more chances to succeed, if the process of data repair is started right after the first error message.

You can try this program right now to make sure, that repair Excel works and you can easily restore corrupted files of Microsoft Excel format. Do not worry, it will not have any consequences for corrupted worksheets, when Recovery Toolbox for Excel repair Excel file, this file remains unchanged and you can try another Excel repair tool.

The process of Excel file repair can be performed for free, please download demo version of this Excel fix and try to repair Excel files. It is much easier, than you think, Recovery Toolbox for Excel is known for its easy user interface, friendly either for professionals or for beginners. Despite its small size and ease, this Excel repair program features powerful data recovery algorithms, that permit to restore more information, than other solutions.

Product page: http://www.recoverytoolbox.com/repair_excel.html

Screenshot: http://www.recoverytoolbox.com/img/screenshot_rt_excel_01big.gif

Download Link: http://www.recoverytoolbox.com/download/RecoveryToolboxForExcelInstall.exe

Buy page: http://www.recoverytoolbox.com/buy_excel.html

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An article about how to use XCACLS and SUNINACL to recovery and set Permissions Security on files and directories very quickly

Keywords:
XCACLS, SUNINACL, CACLS, permissions security, perms, chmod, Domain Permissions, attrib, fast permissions recovery, lost file permissions

You Have 50GB Of Data To Move Along With Permissions Security
—————————-
This article is about several tools that can save a Windows administrators you know what in the event of a large scale permissions security problem.

Here is a fictional scenario we can use to illustrate the use of the XCACLS tool. We need to move or copy 50GB worth of data that is comprised of several thousand directories containing hundreds of thousands of small files from one storage system to another. These systems happen to part of a Windows 2000 Domain and permissions are quite granular in definition. We start the replication of that data using a favorite replication or synchronization tool and walk away for the evening. When we return the next day, everything has copied and all looks well. That is until you try to access the data.

The Data Is Copied, But I Cannot Access It: Permissions Security Problem
————————————————–
What you did not know, until just now, is that the root directory of the drive that you copied the data to had the wrong permissions assigned to it. In addition, inheritance was configured such that any data that is placed on the drive is over written with the permissions of the root directory. In this case, it was an old account that no longer existed. Believe it or not, that can happen, and system administrators will know what I am talking about. Now you are left with trying to figure out what to do. Do I format the new drive, change the permissions and inheritance on the root directory so they are correct and start all over again? Do I make the changes on the root drive so they have the correct permissions and wait hours upon hours for the permissions to propagate? No, there is another, very fast way of resolving this issue with XCACLS or another tool called SUBINACL.

XCALCS Quickly Resets Permissions On Directories And Files
—————————-
Becasue I have limited space in this article, I am going to use XCACLS as the tool to correct this problem. However, in complex permissions structures, you will most likely want to use SUBINACL to fix the issue. I will talk about SUBINACL briefly at the end of the article.

XCACLS as a very fast tool that can set, remove, add, and change permissions on files and directories. For intance, the following command replaces all existing access rights and accounts with that of “dmiller” on the file “file.txt” with read-only access: “xcalcs file.txt /Y /T /G domain\dmiller:r”. Although that is pretty easy and helpful, what about changing all my directories and files, which I have thousands of, to allow the domain\dmiller account to have full access? To do this in a very fast fashion you could execute the following from the root directory of the drive: “for /d %g IN (*.*) DO xcacls “%g” /Y /T /G domain\dmiller:f”. This will go through every directory, subdirectory, and file and replace the current permissions with dmiller having full access to the object. You’ll notice I put “” around the %g in the example. This is not required, but if you have directories that have names with spaces in them you will need to have the “”.

What Other Ways Can I Use XCACLS To Change Security Permissions
———————————————————-
To give you a few additional handy examples of how you can use this tool take a look at the follow command prompt methods for replacing, updating and removing accounts and permissions from large numbers of directories and files.

The following command replaces all existing access rights an accounts with that of dmiller with read only access rights:
for /d %g IN (*.*) DO xcacls “%g” /Y /T /G domain\dmiller:r

The following command does not replace existing account permissions, instead, it adds the account, in the example the local admin account, with read only permissions:
for /d %g IN (*.*) DO xcacls “%g” /Y /E /T /G administrator:r

The following command removes the account “administrator” permissions from all directories, files, and subdirectories: for /d %g IN (*.*) DO xcacls “%g” /Y /E /T /R administrator

This command should update all the directories and their contents to allow Domain Admins full access:
for /d %g IN (*.*) DO xcacls “%g” /Y /T /G “Domain Admins:f”

I did a test on my XP Pro workstation and was able to change the permissions on approximately 10000 directories and files in less 1 minute. On one of my servers I was able to achieve a 500% increase in speed. It is blazingly fast.

SUBINACL Is More Complex But Man Can It Really Save The Day
———————————————–
I cannot go into specifics about this tool in this article but I will tell you what it can do. And again, it does it very very fast. Using the same scenario as above, let’s say that you had to fix the permissions on thousands of home directories. With SUBINACL, you can actually go to the original directories and files, use the tool to create what is called a “play file”, a text file that contains the right account and permissions from the source files, then use that same file to tell SUBINACL to fix the permissions on the target storage system, the one with the screwed up permissions. It’s quite the life saver if you ever find yourself in the type of predicament.

Also check out “CACLS”. This command is inherent to Windows XP Professional.

Conclusion
———-
These tools are contained in the Windows 2000 and 2003 server resource tool kit, however several of them also exist native to the Windows XP environment. Check them out if you don’t already know about them. Even if you have no use for them right now it may save you hours of hard work and stress in the event of a future permissions problem.

You may reprint or publish this article free of charge as long as the bylines are included.

Original URL (The Web version of the article)
————
http://www.defendingthenet.com/NewsLetters/XCACLS-SUBINACL-AndOtherPermissionSecurityRecoveryTools.htm

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Search, preview and recover deleted Microsoft Word documents. DiskInternals Word Recovery offers the best of data recovery, offering unprecedented efficiency dealing specifically with Word documents

Keywords:
word recovery, data recovery software, undelete, doc, rtf, FAT, NTFS, CD, DVD, hard drive

If you type a lot and are using Microsoft Word as your text processor, you’ve made the right choice. Microsoft Word is arguably the most powerful, feature-rich and handy to use by complete beginners and advanced professionals altogether. It has unparalleled strengths in creating, formatting and modifying all types of documents, from simple memos to complex reports. When you save a document in one version of Microsoft Word, it can usually be opened in a different version without problems.

But what if the document you’ve spent so much time on just disappears? What can happen to it? First and most possible, you can simply delete it yourself by an accident. You might think that this would never happen to you because there is the Windows Recycle Bin, and even if it’s accidentally emptied, you’ll just go to the Internet and get a free undelete utility. Well, it does not work this way…

Here’s what happened to my wife a couple of weeks ago. She was working on a chapter for her Ph.D. thesis, and sent it to a professor for review. Usually, she gets back a document with embedded comments by email. She saves an attachment from the email, overwriting the old one, and deletes it from her Hotmail account. But this time, things went the wrong way. She received her chapter by email and replaced the old document with the new one, only to find out that her supervisor got a copy of the old one! She opened the Recycle Bin and found out that the document was never deleted but instead, it was replaced, so it wasn’t even in the Recycle Bin. She tried to find an email that she had sent earlier, but Hotmail does not store sent messages. She asked me to do something to recover the document, and I downloaded a couple of free undelete programs, only to find that there were several dozens of deleted documents with that same name. So, I failed to recover the most recent revisions.

This story did have a happy ending, as my wife’s supervisor discovered the latest version of the document on her computer. But one thing that I learned from this story was never to rely on the Recycle Bin and free data recovery tools. To prevent this kind of things from happening, I decided to look for commercial alternatives.

I quickly discovered that there are many data recovery offers on the market. Most products mention recovering deleted or corrupted files and documents, and some tools promise recovery of files even from crashed or damaged hard drives. There are basically two types of data recovery products. They are different in how they find the lost files, and what they do to recover them. Simpler products, such as those free undelete utilities that I tried in my quest, deal with the file system. They simply scan the file system looking for records of files that are marked “deleted”, and clear the mark. This is a fast and easy way to recover lost files, and it works sometimes, especially if you deleted a file just a minute ago.

These products, as I discovered from my own experience, fail to do their job if you have a complex case or if you are recovering a failed hard drive, or if the file system is damaged. If your document has been deleted some time ago or overwritten with another file, chances of successful recovery using these tools are slim.

The other type of products deals with your hard drive directly instead of scanning the file system, but such products are slow and expensive. I also found them extremely complex to use because they don’t show the names of the deleted documents, let alone their content. These tools don’t have access to the file system, and are unaware of the files’ names, showing documents as “document_001.doc” at best, but more likely you’ll see something like “~ocume1″ instead of a proper name.

Then I found DiskInternals Word Recovery. It does an amazing thing by combining the best of the other data recovery products, while offering unprecedented efficiency dealing specifically with Microsoft Word documents such as .DOC and .RTF. It scans the file system and learns about the files that were deleted the way the free undelete tools do. Then, it goes further and scans the hard drive directly to locate Microsoft Word documents that are not shown in the file system. It uses a list of file signatures to detect the beginning and end of Microsoft Word documents, and extracts their contents and metadata on the fly. This method is said to work even if your hard drive is half dead!

DiskInternals Word Recovery synchronizes the results obtained with the file system scan with the results obtained by accessing the hard disk directly, presenting the most complete list of recoverable Word documents along with their file names, metadata and contents, and yields the best ratio of recoverability.

If I wanted to get the latest version of any Word document, I would simply use “On the Fly” filters that allow to only display files with specific title, written by specific author, or the files that contain certain text, are of a certain size, or are last saved on a specific date. The free version of DiskInternals Word Recovery allows full file preview to ensure you recover exactly what you want, and that you can recover the document in full with no garbage or missing parts.

DiskInternals Word Recovery if not free, but I for one am done with the free recovery tools. You can download and try an evaluation version for free from http://www.diskinternals.com/ , and only purchase if you see that DiskInternals Word Recovery does indeed deliver what others just offer: the complete recovery of your lost Microsoft Word documents.

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VPN services, your virtual network

Keywords:
Data

How does Virtual Private Network service work in banking?
Whenever you use the internet through an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or at another site, your computer is given an address on that provider’s network. While you can reach your bank from the Internet, you will normally be denied access to services that are restricted to bank network addresses because your computer is using an address from an external network.

But, if you are on the internet, you can still connect to the Bank’s VPN service, in two ways. From a web browser or with a software VPN client. A VPN need not have explicit security features, such as authentication or content encryption. Virtual Private Network setup, can be used to separate traffic of different user communities over an underlying network with strong security features.

Seek secured private connectivity across public IP networks!

Extends geographical connectivity
Improves productivity
Improves security
Reduce transit time and transportation costs for remote users
Reduce operational costs versus traditional WAN
Simplify network topology
Provides global networking opportunities
Provides broadband networking compatibility
Provides faster ROI than traditional WAN
Provides telecommuter support

VPN are categorised into two types:
• Remote access VPN
• Site to site VPN

What is site to site Virtual Private Network in banking?
Such Site to site VPN allows you to have a secured connection between locations across the open internet. With the help if site to site VPN your bank can save a great deal of money, as you can use cheaper means always – on connections such as domestic broadband rather than expensive leased lines between sites.

What about Remote access VPN?
Remote access VPN also known as Virtual Private Dial up(VPDN) is used by banks who have staff regularly working in locations outside the office. You can connect into the office network over dial up phone/isdn lines or over broadband from anywhere.

Virtual Private Network banking uses advanced encryption and tunneling to permit computers to establish secure, end-to-end, private network connections over insecure networks, such as the Internet or wireless networks. VPN services can impact your overall computing and network performance. VPNs exist to protect traffic on public data networks like the Internet. VPN Services will work with other ISP dialup services too. Try your online route for your VPN.

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