Telephone Scam

I received an interesting call this morning from a nice lady in India... She said she was from BT and she was ringing me to let me know that my computer had been reporting that it had corrupt files and she would like to help me out. Great! Only problem is that being somewhat techy and being awake I spotted a few flaws in the argument. Being from BT she should have nothing to do with my Virgin line, my laptop is reasonably secure and I know all the software that has ever gone onto it (fresh install of Win7 to get rid of all manufacturers rubbish) so I can't think what would be reporting my corrupt files to BT... So I suggested it was a scam and hung up on her, which although not entirely gentlemanly was better than listening to any more tripe and wasting my day.

I'm not sure if there are any sensible ways to protect against such scams, any suggestions gratefully received! As my old headmaster used to say 'Take care out there!'.

Recover Canon RAW .cr2 files from corrupt SD card

Yesterday I put my SD card into my laptop and was confronted with a rather scary 'errors have have been found on your disk' type message followed by a check disk which proceeded to crash and the files and folders on my SD card were turned into porridge.

Fighting the panic I thought to myself, I am a resourceful and reasonably knowledgeable person, let's get these back...! And so I entered the world of file recovery programs. After a few downloads/installs it quickly became apparent that JPG files and standard file formats are pretty easy to recover, however .CR2 files (or Canon RAW) are not that widely known to file recovery programs. From my vague understanding the software needs to look for the wrappers for different file types but if it doesn't know the file type it won't find it.

Anyway, after a rather long and slightly worrying morning I finally found Recover Plus Photo Recovery (snappy...). It isn't pretty, it takes a while, BUT it does what it says and for me it got back everything, about 7GB of a mixture of JPG/.CR2/.AVI and other odds and ends that were on the card including a number of photos I had deleted a long time ago. The great thing is that before spending any money (yes, it is ~$35) that you can see previews of the files it has found. This is great as you know you're not going to waste your money!

This has brought home how important it is to go for posh, shiny SD cards as the ones I bought were relatively cheap Transcend ones. I will be getting a couple of SanDisk Exteme Pro cards to replace the ones I have as I don't want to risk corruption again... (I had a 16GB card just die completely on me not that long ago, again a cheap card...).

Essential free software recommendations

There are a lot of free software packages around so I thought I would post my favourites here with a micro review which should help in case you want to save some pennies!

Google Chrome - a new fast and relatively secure browser which took a little getting used to but the speed and simplicity are my favourite elements. A must have in my opinion!

Google Picasa - manage your photos easily with this great tool and it has an online facility too where the storage is surprisingly cheap which works well as a backup.

Firefox - a good compromise of speed and reliability with an unmatched number of add-ons

Filezilla - a simple, open source FTP client

AVG - simple, effective and free antivirus software, the paid package is good too

Spotify - stream any music you want to your computer for free or pay to remove adverts and use on your mobile smartphone (android and iPhone), a great product

Skype - free computer to computer calls anywhere in the world, instant messaging and even video conferencing, great free software for keeping in touch

Erasing your data securely

A friend asked what to do to securely erase files when giving their computer to a charity and this is the response I came up with, if you have any suggestions for better software please let me know!

When you delete files on your computer they don't just vanish into thin air, the 1s and 0s that make up the file still remain and these can be retrieved fairly easily (think of all those lovely file recovery programs). Even when a file is overwritten there is still a 'shadow' of the data left behind, this is because of the magnetic nature of hard disks (think of aligning iron filings with a magnet, most will align but not all, and the ones that aren't aligned represent this data shadow).

To properly delete files you can use something like Eraser which can securely erase files you choose. The recommendation is to repeat the process a number of times (3-7) which Eraser supports. However this will only remove the files that you are aware of and things like email and associated settings tend to be hidden away and thus wouldn't be removed. With a bit of work you could probably also remove the email and associated settings but it wouldn't be desperately simple. The Eraser forum has a few posts on how to do this if you don't want to go for the ultimate solution...

The ultimate solution (without destroying the hard disk and putting a new one in) is to do a low level format of the disk a number of times then reinstall everything. This may be overkill but it depends on how important the data to erase is. To do the ultimate wipe (remember, this will wipe windows, all software and all data on the disk and will require a full reinstall of windows/any other software required so you will need a recovery disk and any installation disks you need to put software back on) you would need to download something likeDarik's Boot and Nuke, burn it to CD, put it in the PC, boot up and run the software then when it is finished put in the recovery disk that came with the PC and do a fresh install. Please remember to backup any important data before doing this and be aware that everything will be totally removed so please use with caution! If in doubt, ask your computer literate friend (I know you have one).

If you are doing this for a charity, check with the charity and see if they offer any services regarding data security, they may well do because they will want to set the PC up in a particular way anyway.