Need for Computer Monitoring

Monitoring the activities of your employees can help you to increase their overall productivity. It is important to figure out what your employees do at working time in order to maintain the output of employee. Computer monitoring enables the administrator to protect the intellectual data, organizational-sensitive documents, etc. from being poached by illegitimate sources. Moreover, LIVE viewing of employees computer screen helps you get real-time updates of what they are doing. Monitoring computer of employees might sound rude, but the truth is 60-70% of employees’ access internet for their personal use at workplaces. Hence, computer monitoring becomes necessary in office.

There is a need to keep a close watch on employees for the sake of security issues when you have the risk of losing intellectual property. When you are giving your employees your resources, it becomes important for you to know how they utilize it within the period of time they get paid to work. Therefore, it becomes imperative to realize what is entering and leaving the organization network. Take a look at the points given below that mark the need of computer monitoring within an organization:

Check what your employees do when they are expected to work- Have you noticed a sudden drop in employee efficiency? Then check out how many hours do your employees spend on working? Employees at some point of their professions turn irresponsible and reckless, which raise the need of a professional computer monitoring. There are proven studies that suggest that the employees spend half of the working hours for their personal works. Fortunately, computer monitoring can easily prevent such activities of the employees. By simply installing a computer monitoring software or time tracking software you can administer the office environment with the detailed report about what they have accessed and what they have done for the day.

Improve employee efficiency- With computer monitoring software, you can control, analyze and optimize the utilization of your organization resources including internet, electricity and the most important resource time. Using computer monitoring software, you can dig into their systems and figure out how you can improve employee efficiency and business productivity.

Prevent loss of intellectual property- Use of social networking websites, instant messengers, FTP, etc. are the biggest sources of information leaks in organizations now days. With the use of computer monitoring software, you can easily prevent leakage of information by monitoring your employee’s conversation closely on MSN and AIM messengers. Moreover, computer monitoring tool gives you the power to control employee activities as you can take occasional screenshots and ask your employee by showing them the proof of their illegitimate activities.

Enhance employee discipline- Mere fact of being monitored will bring the required changes in your employee productivity. They will start spending more time on work than spending working hours for personal pleasure. The allotted resources will be used for official use only and hence, the discipline will be maintained while using Internet and other communication resources. The use of computer monitoring tool will surely increase employee responsibility levels.

However, it is important to note that the computer monitoring must not be performed by IT or security department as it is a full-fledged matter of management, legalities, and human resources. The main aim behind computer monitoring is of risk management and so it is related to security of the organization. Furthermore, computer monitoring is the part of overall employee management and organizational property security strategy. There will always be a need of controlling employee sabotages and preventing transfer or sensitive organizational data as cases like information leak occur very often. In fact, computer monitoring tool can make an employer, manager, administrator or any high authority be assured about employee activities during office hours. The computer monitoring tool can be installed on Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2003, and Windows 2000 operating systems.

Some Tips For Minimizing Chances Of Performing Tape Data Recovery

Tape backups are still being used in many parts of the globe for storing important backup by business users. Despite the popularity of Compact Discs and DVDs, tapes are often used as storage media for their cost-effectiveness for saving per MB of data. Still, just like any other storage media, tape drives, backup tapes or tape backup files might just fail. Although, there are number of tape data recovery software available in the market today, but it’s always better to be preventive. Here are some tips on minimizing the chances of a tape from getting corrupt:

Verify tape data at regular intervals- There are many backup software that offer the option of “read after write” to verify that your data is validated and verified. Although, this process might be time consuming, but for crucial files, it is important to do a full verification regularly.

Store one copy of tape data off-site- Saving a copy of data on an individual storage media will help you ensure that your data is preserved. Primarily used platforms often experience corruption due to some untimely disaster. Therefore, the best way to ensure safety of data is to keep a copy of tape data off-site.

Store your tape records appropriately- With tapes saved on site, you can keep your important tape copies stored in a stable environment, away from extreme temperature, humidity and electro-magnetic rays.

Keep rotating tapes- Instead of using the same tape again and again, keep using multiple tapes. Use ‘n’ number of tapes for storing your data. Keep rotating their shifts, for example use tape 1 on first day, tape 2 on second day and then use tape 1 again on third day. This prevents the tapes from being used extensively, thus prevents them from getting corrupt.

Forecasting expiry- Tapes are usually entitled to be used from 5000 times to 500000 times depending on the kind of tape being used.

Maintenance of Tape- Clean your tape drives periodically, make sure that the alignment of the drive is checked every 12 to 18 months. Most of the business sends the drive backup to the manufacturer when it starts to display problems.

Perform routine checkups- Keep testing your tape media at regular intervals and its backup copy for restore processes. For example, check whether you can restore the data from these media to different server or another partition or folder on the same server different from the one where the original information is store.

Other than all the tips given above, it is important to know that you cannot assume your technology is never going to fail. Electronic media is prone to failure and corruption and therefore their proper maintenance and testing is always important. However, if you lose your tape data somehow, we recommend you to switch to Tape Data Recovery tools for professional help. These tape data recovery utilities are devised to recover your data from corrupt, damaged and inaccessible tape media, so that your backup data stored in tape media can be utilized for the purpose it is kept. Tape recovery software can be used to recover data from all types of tape cartridges like DLT, LTO, AIT, DAT, etc.

Restore Deleted Files In Case Of Corrupt Hard Drive

Hard disk corruption issues are so common that even a home user knows how to get rid of these problems. Hard disk drive comprises mainly of the following three items, which are:

• Platters- These are coated with magnetic substance and spin at a high speed under hard disk’s actuator arm.

• Actuator Arm- The arm moves backwards and forwards over the surface of each platter.

• Copper Wire- At the end of actuator arm, a small copper wire is present.

The computing machine sends a pulse through the copper wire at the end of actuator arm, it changes the state of the magnetic surface of the platter as it passes under it. This way the files, which were stored on the computer are encoded into the magnetic substance. Hard drive disk failures might occur due to numerous natural or artificial reasons; what more with the increasing issues regarding hard disk; you can also browse through data recovery tips to fetch some information on hard disk preventive measures.

You can attempt to write the hard disk or formatting the partitions in order to avoid any kind of data loss or data corruption that might result to be harmful. It might be also because of infection or corrupt files that are saved in the hard disk, which might trigger the hard drive to damage. Although, creating backups of the data in hard disk is often suggested, but not everyone thinks of updating the databases.

In order to Restore Deleted Files due to corruption of hard disk might vary for different operating systems or file systems, since their make and production standards are kept different. Additionally, the file systems are different in every operating system. However, you can check yourself it can quickly restore deleted file:

1.Install Windows (or any other operating system) on another (external) hard drive

2.Run Scandisk/CHKDSK utilities from other operating system on bad drive (Important- don’t use similar operating system disk repairing utilities)

3.Scan the bad drive with anti-virus (First, create a backup)

4.Create a backup of critical files over the temp drive

5.Boot from clean floppy, FDISK bad drive, reboot

6.Boot from clean floppy, format bad drive

7.Install Windows on repaired drive

8.Restore backup files to the repaired drive

9.However, keep a temporary backup drive incase bad drive has hardware failure

With this, your bad hard drive will get back into working condition. It is suggested, that under any circumstances, user must not run any repair utility such as ScanDisk or Chkdsk from the same operating system. As they might remain unable to repair the hard disk and there is a chance that your file might become irrecoverable. However, if after following the above process, the issue with the hard drive persists. Then use an advanced and intuitive restore deleted file software to recover data and repair bad hard disk drive. Using such software the deleted or missing file can be recovered without any problem. Such software can be installed on Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2003, or Windows 2000 operating systems to recover deleted data.

NTFS File Recovery When Windows Registry Corrupts

Microsoft Windows is a quite popular and exhaustively used operating system across the globe. One of the chief reason as well as distinctive feature of MS Windows is Windows Registry, which is also the core of Microsoft Windows. Windows Registry plays the most imperative role in maintaining and managing the overall operating system configuration. It’s like, each time we install software or make any change to the settings in Windows; registry updates take place to mark the installation of the new software.

If in case, you feel the need to increasing performance of your system or bring back the lost Administrator account (after creation of one of multiple new users) to the Welcome Screen, Windows registry can offer you a possible solution. Comparatively, no other operating system provides you the flexibility offered by Windows registry. However, excess of information and fragmentation might result in Windows to crash due to registry errors and lead the user to perform NTFS file recovery.

The .reg files are used to backup the Windows registry or some data in it. You can use the .reg files for numerous purposes such as adding missing information into the Windows registry, retrieving all encompassing registry when software errors etc. occur as well as resolving the issues such as application errors as .reg files in Windows through the registry. In addition to this, the Windows Registry is responsible for keeping registry files even after we uninstall software such as MS Office Suite etc, which is one of the most common reasons behind increase of registry size. Therefore, we must always remove such .reg files preferably using software and defragment the Windows Registry to keep it free from any troubleshooting requirements.

You can simply export all the registry information in a single .reg file to your system for creating an exhaustive backup of Window registry. These .reg files can only be used with same installation of Windows in case of any trouble affecting your system. Mentioned below is the method to do this:

1.Click the Start button and go to Run; type regedit and click on OK. Now go to the File menu and click Export

2.You will check the ‘Export Registry File’ window so that we can select the preferred location and type a file name for the registry backup

3.In a same fashion, you can import this file by going to File menu, selecting the Import option, if in case you face some issues such as operating system such as application errors related to registry corruption.

Therefore, whenever you need to restore the registry from the .reg backup, ensure that no application programs are open and minimal items are running as of startup environment. Users often commit mistake of storing such critical .reg files locally, whereas these files must be stored at some external hard drive or optical media. Such mistakes might just lead you to another disaster by corrupting index information etc. Hence, always use NTFS File Recovery if one of your NTFS partition has been lost, damaged or gone missing. It helps you to recover lost or deleted partition and repair corrupt or damaged partition. All data available in NTFS partition can be recovered conveniently using this utility. NTFS file recovery tool supports all types of operating systems to help users recover lost data.

Partition Repair After Conversion Of Dynamic Disk To Basic Disk

We all know that hard drive partitions are created using MBR (Master Boot Record) partitioning scheme in Microsoft Windows OS environment. MBR’s function is to list and store primary partition entries in the Partition Table. Any number of partitions of hard disk can be created. No matter how many partitions are there on hard drive, MBR stores information for only first 4 primary partitions. All other Windows partitions are known as secondary partitions and their descriptors are stored in the linked list that starts from MBR.

Because of some issues with partitioning scheme, you might end up with failed partitioning of hard disk. Consequently, the hard drive partitions become completely inaccessible and you come across partition loss situations. With advancement in technology, many prolific partition repair software have been developed and are easily available over Internet. Partition Repair software assists you to recover data in case of failed partitioning.

Actually, the thing is dynamic disks in Microsoft Windows support only few numbers of disk partition types that include OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) partition, type 0x42 partitions for dynamic disk and the extended partitions. In addition, when MBR itself is damaged, even the basic Windows disk might be reported as a corrupt dynamic disk. This problem generally occurs in Microsoft Windows 2003 and 2000.

Following are some of the main reasons that lead to such disastrous situation:

• The MBR might hold some invalid partition type because of the use of wrong hard drive partitioning tool. In these cases, any attempt to convert your dynamic disk to a basic disk fails. With the help of Diskpart.exe, you can successfully convert the disk, but after you rescan it, hard drive again appears as Dynamic unreadable. Although, this is to be ensured that all of the data is backed up before you actually follow any disk conversion process. The procedure includes steps, which remove data and thus the backup is always required. A failed backup will need Partition Recovery.

• When the MBR or EBR gets damaged, if hexadecimal 0x42 values available in any of them, the operating system consider it as the dynamic disk even if the disk was not dynamic.

Resolution

In order to resolve this problem, you are required to determine first that if this is the case of invalid identification of system. If this one is not the issue, then definitely the problem is due to damaged data structure, which can be handled using Partition Repair Software. An efficient and eminent partition repair tool can resolve this issue easily and provide the user with all previous data present in the hard drive. It recovers data even if the boot sector, partition table or MBR is damaged. Once data recovered, the user can easily save it to safe and desired location. A third party partition repair software can be used to repair partition on Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2003, 2000, and earlier operating systems.