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39 Comments
- evolver, on 10/12/2007, -5/+40I remember when years ago someone created an e-mail client that was free, had REALLY good functionality, and even the US government started using it. Around a year later a message from the developer was sent to all users of this product telling them they could have all their e-mails viewed and/or stolen and actually sent to the users the ids/passwords of the accounts to prove it! The FBI immediately tried to find this developer but to no avail. This was the first example of someone planting spy-ware into software. The funny thing was this guy's only purpose was to prove a point: People are WAY to trusting with no auditing (or ability to audit without decompiling), and no accountability. This was back in the late 90's before the terms "spy-ware" or "Trojans" were even being used in everyday conversation. After reading this article I didn't trust free software with no source code. Period. Given that even Microsoft now has SPY-WARE in ALL their OS's beginning with XP (oh and if you install media player 10 with additional Spy-ware and DRM you CAN'T remove it, even with System restore, thanks MS), I'd say if anybody is releasing a compiled application it needs to be examined for things like violating privacy. Even large companies are screwing their customers as well as playing "both sides of the fence", like Microsoft and recently AMD (ATI to include DRM enforcement in their Video cards). The fact there is a Linux version of this tool and no source code makes it DOUBLY suspect. Since we can get the SAME functionality (better actually) with dd, ddrescue and dd_rescue, why risk it? I suspect there is a hidden agenda which is why this person won't reveal the source in spite of the fact free tools that do the SAME thing already exist. While I'm sure the person who dugg this meant, well, it could do the IT community more harm than good and I challenge the developer to reveal his source to prove there is no funny business or put a price tag on it so if there is any "funny business" he must REVEAL it or get sued upon discovery.
- lassegs, on 10/12/2007, -7/+30I would think Ubuntu was todays download?
- leobaby, on 10/12/2007, -7/+29"What does this offer that the open source ddrescue doesn't?"
A lack of smugness? A version accessible by the average user? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18I'm guessing unstoppable copier can be easily run in windows without having to recompile anything.
In any case, i get a blank page when trying to view the article so here's a link to majorgeek's download
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download2623.html - john570, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Please provide a source to backup your comment that write-able DVD media lasts no more than two years. I say bull to that comment.
- geodescent, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8I used to use a tool just like this that ran on Windows 95 back in the day while working at a Microlab at college. You'd be surprised how many students save the ONLY copy of their thesis on a floppy. The end result isn't pretty but at least it's what they typed.
- Romanito, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7For your information, this been has been tested for spyware and such by Softpedia. I don't know if these tests are truely reliable though, but it's better than nothing.
- SanTe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6...unless your data runs into the hundreds of gigabytes. In that case DVD-R will prove to be a painful backup method.
Hard drive space is cheap. If you have a desktop PC with room for more than one hard drive, pick up another drive and use a disk imaging program for weekly or monthly backups. I recently replaced my two 120GB drives with two 320GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drives for $85 a piece from Newegg. Use a disk imaging app once a month or so to clone your primary drive to your backup drive -- OS, apps, tweaks, data and all.
I use Ghost 2003 because it's simple and it works but there are other options out there. I believe there are even no cost open source disk imaging tools if memory serves...
Some may suggest disk mirroring but I recommend against it. If you make a change that borks your OS install or otherwise thrashes your setup, that change is copied in real time to the other drive. Real time backups aren't really backups... - str3ama, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6while you make a good point with people just trusting software too easily, the problem with what you've written is that it's grounded in a lot of made up facts. MS adds a lot of crap to their stuff, but I think you're vilifying them too much - it's also common practice to praise Apple while doing this. These companies (and by these I mean Apple, MS, EA Games, Vivendi, Adobe and even Valve/STEAM) add homing routines to their programs to find out more about the user - which can be interpreted as spyware.
- unusualbob, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8solution = firewall
- outhouseinput, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3A firewall won't protect you against something like this. They are sneaky; the routines are written directly into the code so it's virtually undetectable. And that's what makes it scary.
- schestowitz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5it's mainly a blurb introducing a tool ( http://www.roadkil.net/unstopcp.html ), but there's no news there really.
- evolver, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I've had issues with Ghost (depends on the Version). Everyone one of Symantec's products (including Antivirus) has gotten messed up since they changed their business strategy and moved virtually all their tech support to India. If you want a superior commercial (you pay $75 USD) backup/cloning tool, check this out:
http://www.acronis.com/
I can honestly say its the most user friendly and effective tool. Especially if you have to clone to different hardware. They have a wonderful GUI wrapper for the syspart tool that forces Windows to create a new hardware profile.
For the ones who have less cash to burn these work but are less user friendly:
http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ (I love this guy)
http://www.livedistro.org/release-announcements/gnu/linux-releases/gparted-clonezilla-livecd-1-7
(being tested by a friend, works well for him with the exception of network links which I'm told tries to copy the data the network links point to. but I'll have to try for myself).
http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?wpid=1&front_id=12
this is good for windows users to have in their utility kit.
Hope the info is useful. - sketchstudios, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3dugg just for the submitters username.
Those krazy koreans!!! - trunk8, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4It is:
http://lifehacker.com/software/ubuntu/download-of-the-day-ubuntu-704-all-platforms-253589.php
Unstoppable Copier is actually yesterday's DotD. - baalzebub, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Operating Systems and software can easily be re-installed & downloaded again if the need ever comes up, what people should do is back up personal data to CD-R/CDRW, or DVD-R so if a harddrive ever gets borked the drive can be replaced and reloaded with the OS & apps of choice and data from backups reloaded, works for me...
- conundrum2007, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Hmm. Considering that so far I have seen three genuinely bad DVD-R's, symptoms were that the drive wouldn't recognise them as a disk.
I don't know exactly what goes wrong but it seems that 99% of DVD drives, if they cannot find a valid TOC will refuse to read at all. The only way I can think of to fix this is to force an overwrite of a very basic TOC by hacking the drive firmware- perhaps this might be a useful project for someone?
Drivesavers do offer a DVD recovery service for $300 a disk (!) so someone can probably make a lot of money this way. IIRC many of the cheapest DVD drives use the same basic mechanism so a "fit all" firmware might be possible.
The other method is to actually read raw data (again hacked firmware) and ignore the ECC entirely or at least log n sector as "bad" in order to salvage every last bit. Steve Gibson, are you listening? :)
As far as the data layers shrinking, the fix for that would be to retrofit a shorter wavelength red LD in there and raise the SNR somewhat. - evolver, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2str3ama, I take it you don't keep up with the tech news. There is nothing made up here. there is (or was) a lawsuit in California which was broadcasted on ZD Net about the "spy ware" to some and "phone home" to others when it was PROVEN by network engineers that the so called "Windows Genuine Advantage" (WGA.exe) only gave an advantage to Microsoft by sending hardware data as well as the IP address back to Microsoft.(IP address = potentially identifiable, ESPECIALLY with a hardware signature) I have personally tested this little demon with firewalls and found out it "dialed home" with hardware info and IP address every time you logged in AND every time you searched for a file. (You can't transmit data over the Internet Anonymously unless you go through something like the TOR network and trust me MS doesn't do that). I'll even give you the address it was using: sa.windows.com. How subtle is that? Even Microsoft admitted it dialed home, but came up with the lame statement that it wasn't spy-ware but they merely "forgot" to inform people what WGA did. Definition of spy-ware: You collect potentially confidential without informing the user ( let alone getting their consent). Microsoft did not give any announcement until AFTER someone caught them. (Little late then). That qualifies as spy-ware. If you collect information without telling someone AND giving them the choice not to install it afterwords its spy-ware. Simple as that. This is ALL documented around ZD net and other communities. Nothing made up here. Its in print. (plus ways to hack and shut the bloody thing down can be found). Vista is well know for its DRM integration. (Sony and even Symantec have been caught using Rootkits and/or rootkit techniques). So what part am I making up? I strongly suspect you either work for or benefit financially from MS (professional blogger for MS maybe?) or even the RIAA. Just do a search on WGA, you'll find LOTS. I tell people to avoid XP and Vista like the plague and stick with Linux. Ubuntu (7.04 is REALLY nice FYI) or Debian are my top pics.Oh, that mail program I mentioned, made big tech news years ago (but perhaps you are too young to remember). I wish I could remember the programs name as it was around 8-9 years gone by. The FBI would LOVE to know the author of that one. Brilliant proof of concept.
Oh, if you still think this is "made up" I have a challenge for you: Install Windows Media Player 10, and then try to remove it without reformatting the drive. A colleague brought this to my attention 2 days ago and it so sad its funny. Guess what "windows advantage " MS sticks you with on their latest updates for Media Player. Hint: its NOT security. Try DRM. And System Restore will NOT REMOVE IT nor will Add/Remove programs. But, hey, I'm making it up, right? Go for it Man!! And when you become a believer that MS (aka big brother) is watching (and crippling) you (and selling you to Hollywood, among others), perhaps you'll check out the open source community so you at least you have the opportunity to examine the code BEFORE you compile/install it. Not all Open Source is free (to avoid confusion here), but as you did correctly pointed out (which is why I do NOT use the following), Adobe, Yahoo and many other software companies are following this unethical trend: Take people's potentially private data and sell it (or profile you which eventually gets sold internally or externally), even if you pay for the use of the products. (Double dipping I call it). The sad part is even if you pay for many of these products, you may still get spy-ware in it. But if you've paid for it you can at least try to sue (as this brave fellow in California did in response to Windows XP WGA). - stugster, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3@evolver, I dugg you up, you make very good points. people are diggin you down because they know best. The average user needs support and help. your points should be noticed.
- MrSunshine, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I hope it's better than all the demo versions of commercial data recovery programs I recently downloaded to rescue a broken harddisk.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5 blah... nothing beats isobuster
http://www.isobuster.com/
http://www.mininova.org/get/358766 - LiberalsSuckAss, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This is similar to a commercial product I've used called "Durable Copy". It's definitely handy in those cases where a CD is scratched or perhaps files were burned onto cheap media and the drive won't read the files via traditional copy methods.
- evolver, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Oh, FYI on Hard drives. Make backups if your hard drives is IDE and it is older than 3-5 years old. I build a lot of computers and so far drives under heavy use seem to gradually develop faults in their data (head crashing?) after that time. I've recently had a large number of inquiries about how to recover data and the one thing the drives have in common are their age (3-5 years). If you have a Western Digital IDE hard drives, back it up and replace it ASAP. I've had a number of reports of Western Digital IDE drives going.. One died one week after it was in use and I couldn't get much useful data off it. No wonder Western Digital IDE's are so cheap. Their SATA drives appear to be okay. Hardware resellers are confronting Hard Drive manufacturers with the idea their reated MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) are completely artificial and don't hold up on the real world. (This was in Computer Dealer's News in Canada). I'm sticking with Seagate ES (enterprise 24x7 rated) hard drives in the hopes they will last more than 3-5 years for the average user especially as the price difference is ~$6-$10 CAD. People are also questioning how much RAIDs will protect from hardware failure. they help but by how much is the question. anyway, some info. DVD's are said to last only 2-5 years (depending on quality) according to IBM because of dye degredation (shrinking layers?? not entirely sure why, heat probably). So I guess it comes down to replacing hard drives and/or using tape backup. Just some FYI for those looking to protect data. Funny enough, the best media for storage in human history is P.A.P.E.R. (which I'm pained to say as I love trees).
- Quadduc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@evolver: I mostly agree with you, but you are not using the term "free software" correctly. "free" in "free software" refers to freedom, not price. The e-mail program you were talking about and Unstoppable Copier is not free software – they are proprietary "freeware" applications. That means you can use them without paying for them, but not in any way you like, you can not study and adapt the source code, you can not redistribute it (at least not as freely), and you can not improve it. The inability to see the source code is, of course, also what makes spyware possible.
Open source is basically free software with a less ethical and more practical viewpoint – http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html has more on the differences.
dd_rescue and the other dd tools are free software. There are more advantages of free software besides the ability to see the source code – you can also use the software however you like, redistribute copies (also commercially), improve the software or have someone else do it and adapt the code to your needs (license requirements apply if you're going to redistribute it – normally it must be released under the same free license)
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html for more. - SanTe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@evolver: Thanks for posting those links. I was being too lazy to look them all up. :) I've heard great things about Acronis but since my copy of Ghost 2003 came free with an external hard drive I bought a few years ago I'm still using that and I've never needed anything else.
- mrcaseyj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1>If you have a desktop PC with room for more than one hard drive, pick up another drive and use a disk imaging program for weekly or monthly backups.
Better yet spend an extra $25 and get an external USB2 enclosure for your second hard drive. Make sure you completely unplug it when not in use so that it won't be vulnerable to electrical surges. This has the added advantage that you can take it with you for other purposes if you need to. You can also easily take it off site for even more protection. - SanTe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The reason I suggested a second internal drive rather than an external is so you can quickly and easily make the cloned backup drive your primary drive and be up and running again in minutes simply by changing the cabling. Not every PC can boot from an external USB hard drive, so you may be limited to dumping an image file of your primary drive to your external. In that scenario, you'd have to boot off of your disk imaging utility's CD and restore the image from the external USB drive. If you have 100GB of data you're looking at over an hour restore time easily.
With a second internal drive you can still unplug it after your clone/backup is done. Just shut down the PC and unplug the PATA/SATA cable and power cable. Only reconnect it to do a restore or a fresh clone/backup.
If you want to completely prevent against electrical surges, mount your internal hard drives with rubber grommets so bare metal isn't touching the drives.
You're right about the benefits of keeping your backups off site though. - evolver, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1owdenbowden, in an attempt to help an interested party ( as opposed to throwing silly comments with clearly no research first), its getting harder and harder to find stuff trustworthy. This is why I've recently become a huge fan of open source because if anyone does something funny, the community has the opportunity to jump all over it. That said here are a few things myself and my colleagues use to recover data:
1. http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/looplinux/rip/ Bootable USB stick with R.I.P Linux (Recovery is Possible). It has a lot to offer for is relatively small size.I boot with that, and run ddrescue. Its not as user-friendly as some gui tools but it works 90% of the time for me (damaged drives from head crashing is sometimes damaged beyond repair as are drives with dead motors as I don't have facilities to ready disk platters so I keep RAID on all my machines)
2. A colleague uses Knoppix disks which are VERY user friendly. My only issue is last time I checked Knoppix only included dd and dd_rescue. these tools work to be sure but...from all reports and experience, GNU ddrescue is better. I can hardly wait until Knoppix includes it in their distros.
3. http://www.e-fense.com/helix/ The Helix Knoppix distros is one of my favorites. When you learn how to use this baby, the world better watch out. Few secrets (by the average user at least) will be safe from you. Of course you can do the tasks of mere mortals like recover data from damaged disks as well. (unfortunately the don't include ddrescue in this one either...MAN).
4. You'll probably enjoy this one but I haven't had time to test it thoroughly yet but I'm familiar with many of the tools they include: http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?wpid=1&front_id=12
This distro is specifically for Windows users.
5. I have a friend testing this one for cloning disks for clients:
http://www.livedistro.org/release-announcements/gnu/linux-releases/gparted-clonezilla-livecd-1-7
I Personally prefer G4U for centralizing disk images but this guy is almost strictly a Windows user but is trying to strive out into a new frontier (I won't say "final"..to Trekie). Its not specifically for data recovery though. But its a very decent disk cloner.
One thing to note, Data recovery from damaged disks is not something people should take too lightly. The other thing I don't like about this program (aside from lack of ability to see source and I doubt anybody has the time to decompile it to look for "little green worms") is that PROPER data recovery from a damaged should do the job with MINIMAL interaction with the defective drive. Otherwise you risk further damage to the disk and data therein (especially in the case of a head crash). All the above links/tools are what people call "LIVE" CD's which means when you boot from them the entire operating system is loaded from the CD/USB into memory. It doesn't touch any hard drive unless you tell it to. This critical in my opinion to data recovery so this tool which it doesn't claim to be a serious recovery tool, gives a false sense of security and could encourage people to not stop and think when data starts to get corrupted. Let it go too long and even the tools above have a limited change of success.
In regards to how do you know if something is safe. Well unless you can see the code and have the opportunity to compile it yourself, its hard to know. Best thing to do with any new program if you don't have the time to troll through the code (if its open source) is to let it sit for at least 3-6 months and see what the other brave testers come back with. That includes open source solutions by the way, because some of them are not at full "1.0" release status. The majority of free open source projects are below 1.0 status meaning there are issues being worked on. Many of them are still very usable (like MythTV for example) but newbies or people looking for user friendly solutions (if they exist) should stick with 1.0+ open source free software if they go that directly. Don't trust anybody (including me). Double check all data with other sources and you'll be well ahead of the game.
4. This is new and a friend of mine is testing it out for use with Windows Machines (2000/XP): - evolver, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Hmmm...good question. I strongly suspect you can rip it. Mind you I advise you to be the legal owner of the disk and do it for archive purposes ("fair use"as they call it in the US I believe). I don't get into this too much but look for ripping tools. The Linux community has MANY of them with different levels of effectiveness. If there isn't a tool for ripping this specific DVD format, there soon will be.
- OwdenBowden, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1evolver Thanks again for the info. I am going to start checking these out. I agree with you about open source and that is why I am doing my best to only use that material. Again thanks for weeding through the crack whore children that Digg has seemed to adopted over the last few months and give me an honest answer.
- OwdenBowden, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3evolver - I give you 3 diggs up. Agree 100% Do you know of a similar type of program that is trust worthy?
- fizztpok, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1The question is this: Can it be used to backup those Sony ARccOS DVDs? Currently the only way to do it in Linux is with VLC.
- bryce, on 10/12/2007, -8/+8Yeah Feisty is definitely the download of today.
http://www.ubuntu.com/ - SlimDady, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0I have been using this for the past 6 months at work. Works well.
- Mejari, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2Buried as inaccurate. Thought this would be a cool mod to ***** with your co-workers.
Oh the never-ending copies! - alexpnx, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1lifehacker is LAME! why not use dd?
- trogdoor, on 10/12/2007, -16/+9What does this offer that the open source ddrescue doesn't?
- meshman, on 10/12/2007, -11/+1I get a blank page.
Id' like to try this. Almost all writeable DVD media lasts no more than 2 years. It would be nice to have a program to at least try and recover the bad areas but because the nature of the problem is shrinkage of the disk layers, I don't think it'll have much luck.
/Taiyo Yuden FTW - jpbleuu, on 10/12/2007, -17/+2@geodescent
i used to tell those kids that they were ***** out of luck then watch them start to cry. mostly the girls would cry though. foolish people.
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