Data Recovery Training & Preparation: An Ounce of Preparation

I stumbled upon a website dedicated to training data recovery technicians and computer repair specialists called “ReclaiMe Data Recovery Training.” The best part is the training is not only very comprehensive, but totally free.

Companies who offer data recovery services would benefit from this free training by learning the latest techniques, tools and tips available. Even for beginners, the content is easy to follow, with short and digestible lessons containing videos and other materials to follow along with. I contend that all businesses with an IT department would benefit from educating their staff in the procedures and challenges covered in ReclaiMe’s training courses. Use it as a way to get your IT department engaged and prepared, as your own reference, or as a refresher course if you’ve ever endured the hassle of having to recover data from a hard drive before.

Understanding Data Recovery Will Save Your Company Money

It will inevitably happen. Your hard drives will fail and you will not be able to access your data, so if you own your own business with multiple computers, you would also benefit from the information you could learn from these free training guides if for no other reason than to avoid being swindled by some unscrupulous IT company that may try to take advantage of your naiveté and over charge you.
After all, sending out your hard drives with your sensitive company data comes with its own risks, but a data recovery company who is aware that you are more technically astute will be less likely to try to pull the wool over your eyes and charge you unfairly. Think of it as free insurance for your company data systems.

ReclaiMe Free Data Recovery Training Courses

As mentioned, besides companies that actually provide data recovery services, any business with a respectable IT department should require at least one person to “train up” with these materials. There are multiple training courses that ReclaiMe offers for free: “NAS – Network Attached Storage”, “RAID Recovery”, and “Partition Recovery”.

Each course provides data recovery videos in an informal training whiteboard/instructor setting, PDF summaries, tips provided by experts, practice exercises to reinforce the material, and even online tests with immediate results. The videos don’t waste anytime getting into the subject matter and are designed and presented as a pyramid of information where they first lay the basic foundation broadly then build upwards with more specific procedures and insights.

The experts at ReclaiMe obviously have a lot of experience and knowledge in data recovery and they present the information in the videos so it’s all easy to follow, akin to an informal TED talk.

Recommendation

Though the ReclaiMe training courses are designed primarily for data recovery technicians and computer repair specialists, many companies that rely on their internal IT departments to set up and take care of their own hardware needs would benefit from this free training. ReclaiMe’s Data Recovery Training website is an extensive and free resource for all types of different hard drive storage setups that provide valuable information and insights about how to restore vital data from failed hard drives.

Many companies never think about this until it happens then data recovery is all they think about until they recover their lost data, projects, and creative masterpieces locked mysteriously inside the corrupt hard drives. Understanding data recovery processes and techniques while picking up useful tips could save your business thousands of dollars in lost revenue or worst, in lost future business. No customer wants to hear that you lost their project and the work they paid for or you missed a critical deadline they were relying on you for because your hard drives crashed at the 11th hour.

Protecting your business and customers means you need to be prepared and be informed. For a free resource, ReclaiMe is providing a lot of information and training basically as a public service.

They obviously are in the business to sell their data recovery software, but they deserve praise for providing such comprehensive training for free. So many companies would really benefit investing some time in studying these materials and staying prepared in case of a data system failure.
It’s good business because protecting your data and understanding how to get it back in case of system failure is itself an insurance policy against potential business interruptions in the future. The only investment required is the time you need to take the courses. An ounce of prevention now could save your company thousands later.

Just Published: Technical Review of "Skipper ORM" for Symfony framework and Doctrine ORM

Visit my technical blog at Tools.Belchamber.us to read about my latest experience with Sensio Labs' Symfony framework, Doctrine ORM and how I used Skipper to help streamline database design, ORM definitions, and mappings for a large e-commerce site in order work more efficiently and be more productive.

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Aaron Belchamber has over 20 years experience in marketing, business systems, web development and media production.  He brings practical and creative solutions to help grow many different kinds of businesses.  Please contact him for a free consultation at 605-858-5145.

Speed up your Wordpress website quickly at no cost

Please check out my latest review of "WP Fastest Cache", a Wordpress plug-in that I have been using this past year.  I hope it helps speed up your website.  In some cases, I have seen a 10 fold decrease in load times!

http://tools.belchamber.us/wordpress-caching-accelerating-your-website-reliably-with-wp-fastest-cache/

Filing Taxes Last Minute? H & R Block Tax Preparation Easy and Fast

If you are looking for a last minute recommendation to filing your taxes, I haven't experienced a better service than H & R Block.  In less than 30 minutes, you can file your taxes at www.HRBlock.com and it's free unless you have some crazy deductions or need to file a Schedule C for a small business.  If you have a couple of businesses, you will only be charged once for one or more Schedule C's.

It's well worth the $34.99 they charge for those extra business write-offs.  H & R Block has continuously improved their website useability and overall cover almost every dreaded IRS income tax detail to the very last stone which they do not leave unturned.  It has been a very good service, it's just, well.... unfortunate that we Americans do it to ourselves and have voted for politicians and created such a monstrous machine.

Why do we subject ourselves to the torture of having to file taxes?   Seriously.

...It's just unfortunate and a waste of our country's resources and collective time that we have this silly annual filing fest in the first place

Why can't it just be a simple pay-as-you-go and WHY, someone please tell me, WHY do we tax peoples' income of all things?!  Taxing income is the most counter-productive, idiotic, self-destructive scam ever invented.  There's no surer way to hold back a nation's potential, burden the poor, and encourage waste, fraud, and sloth.  Why do we punish people for working to put food on the table?  Why do we discourage industry and productivity so directly?  Why don't we just come out and say it -- "If you work you will have to pay for the privilege."  How stupid can you get?

I know what you're going to say, it's because we need to pay taxes for all the government provides us.  Do you really think the government provides us?  Is taxing income really the only way a government can get money from its citizens?  Really?!  Think about this -- your taxes are providing for the government and in return you get to categorize, file, claim, mail, vouch, record, stamp, sign, seal, file (again), notarize, pay, deposit, dispute, amend, stand in line like some paralegal clerk on endless fools errands.  Yes, all these fun things for us all to do, enacted by us all.

We're all a bunch of foolish chumps getting fleeced, out to turn hard working Americans into pencil pushing, paper filing, tie-wearing, accountant and attorney supporting misguided, misallocating sissies our predecessors, ancestors, forefathers, past titans of industry, previous philosophers and other real people who helped build this country with their blood and sweat would shake their head in disgust at.  We have lost our way, America.

For those who would also appreciate the absurdity of carrying a typewriter into a battlefield, I hope one day we regain our common sense and find a better way and lean our government to the size and scope the Constitution is meant to restrict it to -- before it's too late.

Until then, be a chump like me and file your taxes on time then go to work and earn the right to do it again.  Aren't we lucky.  ... or start voting Libertarian!

Tortoise SVN & CollabNet Subversion Edge: A great document versioning repository starter kit and a simple and fast way to manage your code projects for free

About two years ago I was introduced to Tortoise SVN.  I confess I heard of it before but never looked into it.  Revision control is very important in managing many of your code projects, but it can even be used for many other types of digital projects and be very useful for any activity where you have a team of people contributing parts of digital assets used towards the compilation of a larger project.  It can store almost any type of file, including text, images, and special documents like PDF and .doc files.

It's a big undo time machine.  It's like a gatekeeper, bookkeeper, filing cabinet, secretary, note taker, and more.  As a matter of fact, the only thing it needs is about a 20 minute installation and plenty of disk space somewhere on your network.  It does most of the work, but if you ever made a change to the website and needed to restore it quickly back to a version that was more stable, you can do all that with a click of a button.

Worry free tracing and tracking as the puzzle gets built

Though I'll focus on the benefits of managing your web code for websites using Tortoise SVN with CollabNet's SubersionEdge SVN server, I can't help but look back and wonder how I worked at so many large corporate companies and they did not take advantage of document versioning and how much easier everyone's lives would have been, how much time we all would have saved had we been using revision control!  It streamlines many things and becomes more useful and vital as the size of your organization and the number of contributors to any digital projects grow.  I am not exaggerating, it will make your company more productive and save countless hours reassembling, hunting down, recreating documents and other digital assets.

The systems that control revisions are called different names, according to its Wiki page, it's known as "revision control", "version control", and "source control".  A VCS is a common acronym for a stand-alone program that accomplishes multiple versioning and document repository tasks.

20 minutes to having a professional code environment

You first need to install and run an SVN server.  There are plenty of different systems out there, some you can install on an existing server, of course, but some come with a server built in.  If this is your first time setting things up, your fastest solution isn't a bad choice at all -- even for large projects.

Install Subversion Edge

Go to www.collab.net/downloads/subversion and download and install the proper Subversion Edge file for your computer.  As of this article, it's free, unless you need the Enterprise version.  If you already have a server running on your computer, keep in mind that Subversion Edge should have its own IP address to work properly or you will have to do some deeper configuration and possibly change the port addresses as well.

Once you install Subversion Edge, there are some basic settings, just follow what they recommend, this should work 90% of the time and won't take you long.  Subversion Edge operates in the background, it's very efficient with your Windows resources.  I'm no Windows expert, but I believe Subversion Edge runs as a service, not a program, so it's not something you click and launch, it's just on until you stop the service in the computer's manage menu.

Getting to the SVN server is as easy as opening a web browser and typing in the computer's IP:3343, the number after the colon being the port.  The actual address will be provided to you upon set up, by the way.  It's simple, now you have a server, it's ready to accept any kind of document.  You have to set up your first repository, but that's easy, this is just like setting up a bank account -- you're setting up a place and some credentials so there's an understanding that things will be deposited or withdrawn in the form of digital information (unfortunately not money!)  I like to use the standard SVN folder structure where all the code gets stored in the /trunk -- just in case you are wondering when you install, your files don't have to mirror this and you can put them anywhere or not even in a sub folder.

Tortoise SVN

Now you need a way to tell your SVN what files and the location of files belong to a designated repository.  That's where Tortoise comes in, it's a simple program that operates on the Windows system level that will then piggy back onto Windows Explorer and add a contextual menu interface to allow you to do all sorts of things with a single file, group of files, or even a collection folders.  Keep in mind that Tortoise SVN isn't a program you double click and run, it's installed and running along with Windows Explorer that you call on mostly by right-clicking  to get to the menu to control things.

Here is a screenshot of Tortoise in action.  By the way, you don't need to install an SVN server like CollabNet, Tortoise does have its own built-in repository system, but this is local file based and really only recommended if your repository locations are kept on your local computer and not somewhere on a shared network drive.

Screenshot of Tortoise SVN contextual menu in Windows

Install Tortoise SVN

Just go to http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads.html and download the proper version for your computer.  There's a lot to learn about revision control and we've just touched the surface.  Knowing your previous code is safe and you can quickly restore code will empower you to not have to worry about keeping versions and multiple versions of files any more so you can focus on being more effective.

The first two commands you will learn is to "Add" files and "Commit" them.  Committing not only sends the files to the server and timestamps them, it allows you to type a quick note so you can reference the phase of the project at that particular time so you can easily reference and find those files later.

Another useful command you will probably use is "Clean Up", though it is unclear the background processes this involves, this usually helps keep your files in order before sending to the repository.  There are plenty of other very useful and more advanced features that you should experiment with when you get more comfortable using revisioning, especially if you work with multiple developers in collaborative team environment -- it's essential to learn how to branch and merge documents.  Also, never again will you have to just wonder how to compare two different versions of the same file and comb through line by line, Tortoise an highlight changes using a very straightforward file comparison tool.

Other uses for revision control

Revision control can also help manage and maintain creative projects such as video production or animations

I highly recommend using revision control for projects outside of web development!  For instance, if you are a 3D animator like me, you will tend to create a lot of versions of the same project and name each file with a sequential number and possibly a small note after it.  Being in the video production business for over 20 years, I know revision control could also help manage video projects, too.  Not only could you keep back ups of your video files automatically, you could version your animations, designs, and video editing projects in Adobe Premiere Pro or Apple Final Cut Pro without resorting to some crazy naming convention.  Whenever you reach a new phase of your project, you simply "Commit" the files to the repository.

Writing a novel?  Break it up into different sections and save them in their own repository so you can later have trackable notes and a history of your writing!

The other nice benefit of using document versioning is that all your past files aren't laying around in your main project folders, they're simply stored in the cloud, waiting for you if you need them!

Looking for an affordable email campaign service? The free version of this one is better than paid versions of most.

Talking eblasts: If it comes down to MyEmma or Mail Chimp, go with the monkey.  I've used both systems pretty extensively for different clients/employers in the past.  I know there are others, but I'm only reviewing what I know.  Constant Contact I hear is good, I know MyEmma is acceptable, Campaigner's a bit clunky, but when it comes to simple, fast, easy to use, yet very powerful, on top of performing best, being more reliable, and has by far the best interface, dashboard, campaign list manager, flexible ways to import your email addresses and other business contacts, it's no contest.

MyEmma?  Yo Emma

MyEmma claims it is designed by designers for designers.  I believe it, there's just something behind the scenes and under the hood that feels like the website was written by designers instead of industry-leading web developers.  Don't get people who mostly write code for a living to design websites, that's a good rule of thumb, but it also goes the other way.  Designers, leave the coding to the coders!

MyEmma's import functions are often clunky and I found them downright unreliable.  In the past, our graphic designer had to upload an Excel spreadsheet sometimes over the course of a couple days.  I found their customer support was slow and unresponsive, but I'll give them credit for following up and correcting the issues... eventually.  It came down to a few services and MyEmma came highly recommended.  They changed their pricing, yet for almost a year, a client of mine was not notified so they kept paying per email sent instead of the unlimited emails sent and pricing structure based on the total list of email recipients.  Not too happy with the fact they were not forthcoming and proactive with their customers.  One client was paying over $400 more each month than if they knew they qualified for the other plan!

Mail Chimp doesn't monkey around

Mail Chimp, on the other hand, I find is not only much easier to use, but for very small businesses with less than a thousand email addresses, you can run email campaigns at absolutely no cost as of this post.  Not only that, I found Mail Chimp's website to be the best in reliability, speed, performance, and interface design.  If you don't know HTML, there are plenty of great templates and a very easy and intuitive editor that will help you compose an email campaign that is fully scalable to mobile devices.  It's also very easy to clone and existing campaign so you don't have to start from scratch.  Before you send the email, or schedule it to be emailed, you can preview it on different devices.  Having tested it on my phone and other devices, it is a very reliable WYSIWYG.

Don't let their playful, goofy name fool you.  Mail Chimp's free service is pretty robust, going pro will unlock many other useful features that will allow you to optimize your campaigns.  As popular and powerful as email is becoming as the premier digital marketing medium, increasing your click through and conversion ratse by a half a percent could yield an amazing increase in profitable results.  Like many of the other email campaigner services, Mail Chimp has all the major features including merging certain data to customize each outgoing email, say, with the recipient's actual name or other useful data that will enable you to optimize your messaging and increase your email marketing effectiveness.

Split A/B Testing and more

Mail Chimp offers an easy way to manage split testing of your emails, it's amazing how small variances to your email design can often yield a 20% improvement.  This is an invaluable research tool that will allow you to increase your email campaigns while also providing you data that can help you determine the most effective marketing calls to action.  What appeals more?  What words inspire action in the market place?  The web is a great source of marketing research that will give you data to help make better and more informed marketing decisions later in other mediums and advertising, such as long form videos, TV commercials, radio ads, print ads, and even billboards.  Regional analytics, if your company has a wide service area, can help you rebalance your store inventory based on regional preferences and what is trending up and down in certain areas.  The web is your front line to experiment and run surveys and test sample your products and services.

A great free introduction

Mail Chimp has a great introductory program so if you have a small business and you don't know where to start, or you don't have much of a budget, you will thank me later by having learned about Mail Chimp here.  It's free to sign up, the website is excellent, its services are extremely powerful, I could go on with my praise.  I've been very impressed.  It's the easiest service to upload or import your client contact data.  They have a great feature where you can select a table from a customer list and copy it to your computer clipboard with Ctrl-C, then just paste it into the import text box.  No clicking "Browse" and having to find the Excel file to only find out it's not formatted right.  That was the problem Riddle's Jewelry was having with MyEmma, it plagued our Advertising Department for over a year.

I've saved a lot of time and also money using Mail Chimp.  It's also a great service for you to learn how to leverage your emails, they make it really easy, but it also has a lot of more powerful features I hope your company will grow and need to take advantage of.


Aaron Belchamber is the former GM of Random Art House advertising agency, former Advertising Director and Lead Web Developer for Riddle's Jewelry, and is currently a Business Consultant and Web Developer in Jacksonville, Florida.

Filing Taxes? H&R Block's Website Simple, Secure, and Affordable.

I don't know why it's affordable, and in most instances, it's absolutely free.  How do these tax prepare companies make any money if the majority of people who use them can file their taxes for less than $25?  It's probably too much of a good thing and it won't last, but I recommend filing your taxes online at hrblock.com.  I know tax time is over, thankfully, for another year, at least.  But perhaps you are filing late because of an extension, or you just weren't happy with the services you paid for last time.

The website and interface are secure and it guides you through all the mundane and just plain boring steps to file your taxes probably in less than an hour if you have all your tax forms already gathered.  Then, you can even file your taxes electronically and send it all to the IRS at the same time.  Job finished.  Go back to raking leaves or doing those other weekend tasks -- almost anything would be more fun, I'm sure you will agree!

If only taxes were pay-as-you-go and the income tax form was a simple post card with a basic mathematical formula.  I guess that would be too predictable and help us all be more productive.  Wouldn't that be the real American way?  One can only dream that we will stop oppressing ourselves with a growing 19 million words of tax code and counting.  Such lunacy, idiocy, complacency, bureaucracy -- and a lot of other words I could use that don't end in "cy".  Good luck, my fellow Americans, we're all going to need it....

Need to Launch An Ecommerce Site Fast That Looks Clean and Professional? This Shopping Cart System Is Amazing at the Price of FREE!

Everyone wants to make money online.  Selling things is probably the easiest and clear-cut way to do this.  To sell effectively, you need a website that not only looks great, it must be reliable and secure.   I manage a few websites that net over $1 million in annual sales.  We are looking to fully redesign these ecommerce sites with the newest adaptive design and other technologies.  Being an "old-school" web programmer, the frameworks, templates and CMS's that have cropped up to assist businesses to launch a full-out web presence faster while looking better and being more reliable than ever, is quickly reaching its apex.  So much technology and innovation happen on the web so quickly, it's a bit overwhelming trying to live your life, do your job, and just keep up with all the changes and improvements.  The cycles of innovation are shortening and the lifespan of websites and designs are shortening even faster.

Your websites need to adapt to new devices.  If your website is not fully integrated to accommodate touch screens and tablets, you might as well start thinking about redesigning your website now.  More than 50% of your website visitors won't be using a mouse come late summer 2014.  The time to think about adapting and redesigning your web assets to improve your customer experience with your brand and increase your sales has long past.  It's better to react late than to stay the course with your outdated website with the small pull down buttons that most people on a tablet either won't be able to read or won't be able to click on.

Our team did some extensive research and decided to go with a shopping cart system and an easily-customizable theme.  We looked at all the options, including a bunch of free shopping cart systems.  The features in some communities are lacking, but we found Magento, www.magento.com, offered a "community" version that was full of features and affordable add-ons (or "plug-ins") that would reduce the SLDC (software development life cycle) from 3-4 months to less than a month.  We went with Magento and bought a theme pack from Envato.com that gave us the ground work already built within the Magento framework, saving us weeks of conceptual design phases.  Even though the customizable theme was less than $100, we still needed it to be adaptive so our website would look good on any device.  By the way, there are plenty of basic themes that look amazing on any device for the very low price of ..... free, you just have to look. 

We wanted some extra features with a particular design and style so we opted for a gorgeous template (I don't believe I'm saying this -- remember when "templates" looked so gaudy?  You could spot a template right when the page loaded?  Not any more.  Web developers, beware, if you're more of a web designer, you best refine your programming and database skills, because you will be going the way of graphic design for the print industry if you don't adapt....)  Anyway, it only took about 20 minutes to download the theme and install it into Magento.  It integrated seamlessly as you would hope, but probably not expect.  (I say "not expect" because that's when you usually get some cryptic error to only find out your web host doesn't allow you to change file permissions for certain directories in which case you should look for a new host.)  Speaking from experience, please make sure your web host accommodates Magento and ask for them to provide any guidelines in the case their server requires some changes to some files or settings before you go full bore into an install only to find out later you have to changes hosts or upgrade to a different server.

Magento's back end can be a little daunting, but there are tools that you can install to make life a little easier, including to help you automate the uploading of your products, images, and information in case you have a lot of SKUs and different product lines.  Depending on the size and scope of your online store, and the type of merchandise you have to offer, I would highly recommend saving the time and limited resources in the development process by setting up this free system instead of insisting your development team write it all from scratch.  I have developed plenty of websites from scratch -- the shopping cart, their back end and product databases, to the front end and full design from the ground up.  There is no need to reinvent the wheel when the open-source community has fully taken on the upkeep of these more labor and code-intensive (not to mention mundane) functions.  Imagine what you can accomplish by freeing up your business resources and the web talent around you to focus on more effective design, marketing, and performance!  You could treat your web development team to breakfast and boost morale instead.  (Sorry, subliminal message there, please ignore.)

Speaking of marketing, Magento is fully integrated with the big players in the industry.  Your website will end up high on searches very quickly, it's SEO performance index is astounding.  More people will find you faster because search engines trust sites that use Magento.  Setting up payments is as easy as plugging in your Pay Pal merchant account information, your Authorize.net, or whatever you use within minutes.  Magento handles many other tasks as well, such as customer log-ins, wish lists, customer reviews.  There are modules to help you "recover" abandoned carts.  Sales reports and everything you need to keep you up with accounting and tax records are built right in.

All these tools are managed through Magento's back end as an administrator and require very little actual web coding knowledge, though it would help tremendously if you had someone who could write PHP and knew CSS and HTML to refine pages and fix any issues that may arise.  There's so much to Magento, I couldn't begin to cover anything but the basics here.  I highly recommend visiting its website at www.Magento.com and learning more about the "Community" edition.  It's amazing what open source gives the masses access to.  Come to think of it, "open source" is the masses -- it's true empowerment for all, worldwide.  Long live open source code, the engine of innovation, the "Libertarians" of the web.

Disk Recovery: Don't Give Up Until You Give R-Tools Technology a Try

These are all unsolicited reviews, I get nothing for them, so know at least I have no incentive either way except to do my part and share my experiences with products and services.  I personally find reviews useful and I hope you will find my truthful, unskewed reviews helpful for you!

When Hard Drive Disaster Strikes, Think R-Studio

A few times in the past 20 years, I've lost a hard drive or two.  Like most, especially when the cost of data storage was prohibitively high and much slower, I was a little behind on the backing up of my data.  One time, it was a power outage while writing to a hard drive, another time I think a client of mine dropped the hard drive, another time, who knows what happened -- Windows could no longer recognize it.

What all of these scenerios had in common was they weren't just inconveniences, but real weeks worth of work were lost, seemingly instantly.... at least I thought.  With client deadlines looming and a bunch of video and web projects locked away in a mysterious maze buried in a pretty reliable external hard drive, crunch time was quickly turning into "panic mode."

Immediately, I played it cool and went online looking for a solution, a FREE software solution first, of course.  There was some albeit questionable freeware, or free trials of data recovery software I found.  I tried three different software packages that couldn't even find the hard drive, so recovery of any data was out of the question with these "solutions", of course.  One trial version made sure I wouldn't forget them anytime soon by sending me a proliferation of unsolicited spam emails.

A little more anxious, I finally stumbled upon R-Tools Technology Inc., http://www.drive-image.com/.  I downloaded their Windows drive recovery solution, "R-Studio", which came with a free trial that would give me a preview of all the files it found, a list of what it thought it could restore, and a limited capability of restoring I think 10 MBs.  I needed to restore NTFS, so there was an option for that particular need.

Please excuse the fact I do not have any screenshots, thankfully, I am using a fairly new computer on Windows 7, so I have not had the need for this product in a few years.  I installed the trial version and gave it a go.  Within 10 minutes, I had R-Studio installed and up on my screen.  The interface looked different than the other trials -- cleaner, intuitive, and easier to follow.  It looked and felt professional.  Still smarting from my previous 3 experiences from other software that made its way through what I thought was a pretty good "crap detector", I clicked a few buttons to recognize any hard drives R-Studio could find to scan and waited, expecting the same, helpless result.

Start the Marching Band -- My Data Was Recovered!

Instead, up popped the drive that none of the other software programs or Windows XP, could even recognize!  I think a parade began a marching song in the background, echoes of a choir could be heard singing "hallelujah!"  I clicked the drive icon and it began to scan its files right away.  Within minutes, I stopped the scan to see if any progress had been made -- sure enough, there were my folders and a list of all my files.  ALL of them!  I restored a few files and anxiously opened them.  One was an Adobe Premiere project file, the other files were video clips and a few Word files.  I loaded the files, opened them, looked them over -- PERFECT!  Not a missing pixel, not a sign of a glitch.

I wasted no time, I went to R-Studio's website, paid for the full version.  The total cost of this software lifesaver was a little less than $50.  They sent me a registration key and I unlocked my trial program to the full version.  I had about 400 GBs of data that needed to be restored and R-Studio recovered all of it to another external hard drive in less than an hour.  I can't say enough about the quality of this product and how much time and trouble it saved me.  Literally weeks of work and it kept me from missing some pretty important customer deadlines.  It even found some deleted files I had thought were lost but I had accidentally deleted.

I would recommend R-Studio and any of there products.  Their program simply stood well above the other solutions I looked into, some much more expensive than R-Studio. 

Best Data Recover Solution for Your Money

I subscribed to their product update emails, which I get no more than once every few months.  Their last email to me let me know of the improvements and updates their awesome software team had been working on:

New features:
+ Support for ReFS (Resilient File System), a new local file system Microsoft introduced in its Windows Server 2012.
+ Support for Windows Server 2012 OS.
+ R-Studio Technician: Integration with DeepSpar Disk Imager, a professional HDD imaging device specifically built for data recovery from hard drives with hardware issues. Such integration provides R-Studio with a low-level fine-tuned access to drives with a certain level of hardware malfunction. Moreover, it allows disk imaging and analyzing be performed simultaneously. That is, any sector R-Studio accesses on the source disk will be immediately copied to a clone disk and any other data recovery operation will be made from that clone disk avoiding further deterioration of the source disk and great reduction in processing time. Read more on our page Integration with Hard Drive Recovery Hardware http://www.r-studio.com/DiskRecoveryHardware.shtml .

To receive future newsletters about the latest software builds click on the following link to subscribe
http://www.r-tt.com/cgi-bin/Newsletter

The latest version of R-Studio (v. 6.2) can be downloaded from our Web page at
http://www.data-recovery-software.net/Data_Recovery_Download.shtml

R-Drive Image software and more information on website and forum:
Site: http://www.drive-image.com
Forum: http://forum.r-tt.com/r-drive-image-5-1-5101-t8378.html