2GB and Sydney Morning Herald

Guest this week was Vicky Brauner who is the Managing Director of CBL Data Recovery Technologies (Australia) Pty Ltd. in Redcliffe, Brisbane and Sydney.

She had some very interesting information on hard drive failure and data recovery. She said there are many degrees of ‘death’ when it comes to hard drives.

Once such degree is Logical recovery is the first. People will notice that things are running a little slowly, programs are not opening as quickly, computer might give you an indication it is time to back up data.  If you were to bring a drive like that into the company’s lab they could still mirror the drive and recover it, and could cost between $400-$1,400.

If your drive gets to the stage where you are hearing a clicking, whirring or grinding then this is a sign that something bad is going on. You should power off immediately instead of trying it on different computers or trying to restart it. Every time you try and restart it, it is making it worse, and it will now become a physical recovery where we have to replace the heads. If you had powered off at the beginning it might have been a logical recovery, not physical, and physical recoveries start at $1,500-$3,000. Listen to the interview here.

I also had an appearance in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday talking about my favourite apps on my smartphone. Obviously Angry Birds was up there, as are Twitter, XE Currency, Skype and Speedtest.com, which gives me that varying speeds around town of speeds of mobile networks.

My product of the week was the Samsung Galaxy S II, which is the latest Android smartphone from the South Korean-based CE manufacturer. I was a fan of the first Galaxy, and this continues off from where the last ended, but is a little bigger, faster and has more battery life.