Scary day at work
Wow. So I worked at the office for basically 12 hours today.
Our server's hard drive crashed, losing all it's data (months worth of work). One minute it was working fine, and the next, it was completely empty. No formatting or anything. It just all disappeared without explanation.
"Well, no problem. We made a backup a couple days ago!"
So we loaded the backup drive. Lo and behold, half the files were missing on it as well!
In desperation, I pulled up google and looked up disk recovery software. 3 hours later, in the midst of the plethora of useless junk out there I found a gem called "File Scavenger". Within minutes, it somehow scanned the entire *empty*, *un-recoverable* hard drive and managed to extract every single file that had existed on it before. To top it off, it even found a bunch of long-forgotten, deleted files as well!
Needless to say, we learned our lesson. We immediately proceeded to the nearest Fry's Electronics. $500 later, we had all the equipment needed to set up a redundant RAID data backup system and were back in business. Now we have two different 250 gig Serial ATA drives set up in a RAID 1 (mirrored) configuration. If one of the drives fails (or even simply becomes unplugged from it's cable), all the data will still be accessible by the network users. Awesome.
To top it off, we also have a third 250 gig drive. But this one is external. So we can make a mirror image of our data and take it home every night just in case our office burns down or the server gets stolen or something.
The way it should be done.
Lawyers and spyware
Ok so I went and fixed a lawyer's computer at his house the other night and then today I went and optimized his computer at his office. It's weird how almost all my business is lawyers, doctors, and retired older people... Maybe it has to do with the fact that it's all by word of mouth?
You know, I hate those spyware creators and what not, but I have to give them credit for about half my business. The irony of it is that I only know how to remove the stuff because of the fact that I used to be all into hacking when I was like 13. I would make trojans that used the same techniques that the spyware these days use to hide on people's computers. So naturally, I usually know how to get rid of it as well...
Here's how my average repair job goes:
1. Download Spybot Search and Destroy from http://www.spybot.info (a completely free, donation supported tool)
2. Download the latest spyware definitions
3. Reboot the computer into safe mode
4. Scan and remove spyware using Spybot, then Immunize it.
5. Look through registry using regedit and msconfig for any abnormal things that are starting up needlessly and disable them
6. Look through the Administrative Tools > Services console for abnormal services that are starting up automatically and disable them
7. Go into Internet Explorer brower options > Settings > View Objects and remove all foreign ActiveX controls
8. Reboot computer into normal mode
9. Install Firefox (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/) as an alternative to Internet Explorer that is less susceptible to spyware.
10. Show person how to use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer
Now, of course there are many variations to that whole scenario, but you get the general gist of the idea.