Atola Blog

Atola insight

We’ve got an Insight

It’s been quiet in our blog last months, and for a good reason. We are currently developing Atola Insight, a data recovery solution. What’s good about it is that it covers all four phases of a data recovery process: diagnostics, firmware recovery, duplication/imaging, and file recovery. The Fourth Element Every data recovery specialist knows about the firmware recovery tools, disk duplication (or imaging) tools, and file recovery (data extraction) tools. But there is one more important thing that often gets overlooked: diagnostics. When a hard drive arrives to the lab, the very first thing a specialist has to do is to find out the current state of the hard drive. Read more…

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Hard drives

Restoring Factory Hard Drive Capacity

[Update 2024] These days Atola Technology makes digital forensic tools that allow restoring HDD capacity, among other more complex and effective capabilities: Atola Insight Forensic Atola TaskForce Atola TaskForce 2   This article is a complete guide on recovering your hard drive’s factory capacity. At the end of this article there is a link to our program that recovers factory capacity of any hard drive. “My hard drive has mysteriously became smaller! How can I restore its full capacity?” There are several common reasons of why your hard drive might lose some megabytes or even gigabytes: Your Operating System does not support LBA48 addressing mode You are mixing binary and Read more…

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Data recovery

Smart partition recovery software

In most partition recovery software, to locate all partitions on a damaged hard drive, you have to scan the entire surface. The process, which is often pretty much useless, may take up to several hours of your precious time, and it may even take days if the hard drive is filled with bad blocks. In the worst case scenario, it can make significant damage to the hard drive, thus making the data recovery process much more complicated and expensive. While the need of scanning the entire hard drive might look reasonable, in vast majority of cases it is not needed. Furthermore, there’s no need to scan more than 1% of Read more…

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Data recovery

Partition Find and Mount v.2.2 released

Revolution in Partition Recovery software is coming! ;-) Today we have released a new version of Partition Find and Mount with many valuable improvements. If you are not familiar with Partition Find and Mount yet – it’s all about finding partitions when the MBR and/or Boot Sector are destroyed. In this release we were primarily focused on dealing with damaged volumes and the speed and quality of partition searching process. Reading a hard drive sector by sector takes a lot of time nowadays, so we are trying to read as little data as possible while not missing anything important. We have developed a number of techniques that allow us to Read more…

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Customer relations

A very nice feedback from happy customer

We receive a lot of positive feedback about our products, but this one made our day… It’s about our free NTFS Undelete product: You really saved my butt! While my wife was sleeping this afternoon, I was a genius and deleted all of our 6-day-old daughter’s baby pictures. Your NTFS Undelete got them back for me. THANK YOU!!!!!!! I was backing up to an external drive (by copying) and hit a snag, so I just deleted everything “from that drive” to start over. On my notebook computer, the Recycle Bin is disabled, so when I realized I was actually deleting the local drive it was too late. Seriously, you saved Read more…

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Business

A number of ways to promote your software

Andy Brice in his blog Successful Software enumerated a great collection of different promotion methods. He also described his own experience with each of them. Here the list of titles from his posts: Search Engines Pay per lick ads Banner ads Download sites Press releases Trade shows Email marketing Direct mail Print ads Forums Free ‘lite’ versions Cold calling Blogging Bloggers Affiliates Resellers Retail One day discounts promotions ebay Cross-selling/bundling Viral marketing Cover CDs Online directories Word of mouth Great job.

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Data recovery

Recover files from lost partition

Hey, we’ve just released nice tool — Partition Find and Mount. This tool allows everyone to easily recover files from lost or accidentally deleted partitions in the very convenient way. So, what are the differences between our software and other tools like R-Studio or similar? I will number three of them. Partition Find and Mount works extremely fast. Scanning your hard drive may take only 0.1 second. All found partitions can be mounted into the system. Mounting will make them available to the operating systems and standard tools like Windows Explorer can be used to access files. Software is extremely easy to use. I know, I know that we probably Read more…

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Business

Looking for a web designer

I am currently looking for a web designer and have to look over a lot of designer work. There is a common thing out there, after Windows XP, there is a “standard” to depict a “user” on the icon with a faceless head. Like on the original XP’s control panel icons: Almost every design studio has some icon with a faceless man. Just to let you know, I will prefer them and other clones to have a face.

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Uncategorized

Usability: How could you know what is better?

Sometimes during development we argue about user interface elements. You can try to convince the developer about how to place controls on the forms to better organize the user’s workflow. But the truth is that it is very hard to know exactly what is better. Usually it is more about psychology and perception than about logic. So how can you be sure? The answer is simple – test! Just pick some random person near you, who is in a target group for your product who sees your product the first time, and ask to perform an action using your interface. And watch how he would perform. In a few minutes Read more…

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago
Data recovery

Undeleting files

My colleague from our lab is working on damaged NTFS file system analysis. This is needed for our new project currently in development. Recently, we thought it would be nice to release some free utility based on the developing library. And so we did. A couple of weeks for GUI development and an hour for a web site and here it is — a free NTFS Undelete utility. It should work on any NTFS file system from Windows NT/2000/2003/XP/Vista, and as far as I know it is the only free undelete software that is distributed in a different bundles — in ready for burning ISO image, ZIP archive and windows Read more…

By Dmitry Postrigan, ago