Off Topic Techy advice please!

There but for the grace of (insert your own) - a salutory warning to us all.
Anyone recommend good backup software, if it's free, even better.

 

Toby is the man with his finger on the pulse but in his absence Mrs HF recommends Acronis. Get it directly from their website. It has saved me in the past. About £40 I believe.

 

I am currently trying to move stuff from the (now two) dodgy drives to the new data drive and have been searching high and low for my photos of the last 4 years and thinking i had lost them. I had found all the ones before that time..... and have just discovered that all this batch (49,000 of them) had all along been saved to the old dodgy drive and I never realised it..... this is the drive that has been barely working for about a year now.. I am now with bated breath transferring them all across.... drive warning messages are coming up on the screen every minute or so.

The amazing thing is i never knew all this time I was saving my images to a folder called my pictures on the dodgy drive... thinking all along I was saving them to the good drive...

 

I use FBackup, it's free and really easy to use

http://www.fbackup.com/

Give me a shout if you need help configuring it? Should only take a few mins.

 

Thanks Toby and HF.

 

That is great news, so good luck with the transfer but I have to wonder at 49,000 photos in 4 years?!

There used to be a programme called CHKDSK on DOS/Windows which checks a drive and in some cases repair it - Toby would advise on the techy aspects of this I guess and there are folk who can, if not repair hard drives, can get files off of them - at a cost of course.

 

Extracting data off broken HDDs depends on the scale of the damage and the age of the HDD.

CHKDSK is run from the command line, you can start it anytime (press the windows button, type 'command prompt' or 'cmd' in the search box and run the CHKDSK command (can't remember the exact syntax, but it's very easy).

It won't really fix anything as such, but if your HDD has bad sectors it will move data around to avoid having any corrupted files. No one should be buying old disk-based hard drives anyway, SSDs are the way forward.

There are plenty of free cloud storage options out there, Gmail offers lots of free space, Dropbox too, and plenty more will give you about 20Gb of storage for free. Otherwise a safe way of keeping your data is getting a storage solution with 2 (or more) drives, so one backs up then copies over to the other drive, giving you 2 copies.

http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/comput...ud-storage-4tb-dual-bay-nas-22090256-pdt.html

This one even gives you remote access to your files, and plugs into the network too so you don't have to have it near your laptop.

If anyone wants any advice before buying any IT equipment give me a shout

 

Thanks guys.. I am a prolific photographer (sadly)!! I am now daily saving to an internal back up drive and an external one for random back ups I have moved to Ssd as my system disk and it is fast... Feeling so much more secure...

 

Anybody got any ideas on a programme that enables me to put all my photos in date order etc? Creation dates have been corrupted when I moved disks..

 

I use Adobe Lightroom which shows a capture date, it shows a capture date which looks like the date I took the photo. I guess it depends on whether your camera records the date the image was taken. I bought lightroom outright rather than pay Adobe £x per month when I use it infrequently. You can try it for free for quite a time after which it shuts down a lot of menu options but continues to function and keeps all your work. I am sure there are other programmes out there but LR power is in its cataloging functions.

 

thanks i will have a look

 

May I seek some advice please?

I own my own domain, which I only use for email. It is currently hosted by talk talk business. I am looking to change broadband provider and when I ask any new potential providers about hosting my domain they go silent in the what are you talking about way.

So how do I keep my domain and use it for email, if I move to another broadband provider. Talk Talk say they will continue to host it and charge me but when I ask if they will still process my emails I get the impression it's a no.

Am reluctant to abandon the domain, but it would be a last resort.

I use Outlook for managing emails.

Any suggestions on who to use for fibre broadband? Plusnet have been recommended a few times, don't have cable and don't want to give sky anymore £££.

Many thanks.

 

Toby will prob be better at this..

But i have my own domain x2 and I route all my emails to gmail.... which has its faults but is free.

I just pay my domain free.... and my broadband provider has nothing to do with it.

Incidentally route my sky mail into the same gmail

 

For the last month or more whenever I turn on my laptop I get a message from Bullguard which states :Bullguard has blocked a suspicious file "SetupITA.exe". I cannot believe I get targeted with the same spam every day so what is going on? Is this a genuine setup file that I should have or not. I looked it up on google but the answer was clear as mud to me.

 

Looks dodgy.... a Toby one I think

 

Hi Scullion,

I'd recommend going with Gmail for your email hosting, you can transfer your domain with the following guide

https://support.google.com/domains/answer/3251236?hl=en

In regards to broadband, Virgin Fibre if you can get it.

 

Had a quick google, looks like it might be malware.

Install and run these

http://www.superantispyware.com/downloadfile.html?productid=SUPERANTISPYWAREFREE

https://www.malwarebytes.com/mwb-download/

Restart your laptop and see if it occurs again.

If it does, try this

https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download/standard

(definitely don't give piriform any cash though, they denied me a job because 'I spoke too fast' )

Lemme know if it still happens

 

Thanks - will try that

 

You are an absolute STAR, Sir!!

 

Thanks Toby, do you need cable to get Virgin? I would have to get over giving money to Branston first tho.

Thanks also to Yorkie for his suggestion.