marmite

At home everything goes through a Vigor 2800G Security Router ... wonderful little bit of kit. It's a bit old now, but still feature-packed. Software firewall varies - a mix of Zone Alarm free (long-standing fan ... pity it's gotten so bloated) and XP built-in. Though not on the same machine obviously . I tried Comodo free once and that was awesome ... but I couldn't afford to employ someone to keep it configured properly . I uninstalled it in the end because it was such a pain to look after - but for a free product the control and flexibility were amazing. Quite fancy trying Smoothwall at some point ... if ever I get an old PC I can build it on ... and the time, of course.

Wot hazelnut says! If you're just looking to keep the size of these down, then possibly the easiest way is to configure them to look after themselves. If you right click on a log in Event Viewer you can configure the log size; so for example you could specify an absolute log size or you could just overwrite events older then a specified number of days. A couple of weeks is probably reasonable on a smoothly running system. Additionally, depending on your OS, if you really want to you can tailor some of the events that are logged. For example in XP Pro you can use Group Policy to modify what Security events are written. If you set this up to be verbose you can get zillions of entries. But the sec logs can be quite useful; so rather than turn them off completely it's better to leave their logging to the recommended default settings as a minimum and then to just restrict by size or age. For troubleshooting potential alone it's probably better not to empty any of the logs completely.

It had finished Stage one and was on Stage 2. Looks like it's the other 14+ million that are blowing it! Maybe Augeas is right - time to consider specialist assistance? It ain't gonna come cheap is it. At least you know what you're doing now isn't harming the data - so you can exhaust reasonable possibilities first. If you do decide to try Active@, the time for a one-pass "quick scan" (which should be sufficient for files that aren't overwritten) extrapolated from the number of files on my system partition should give you a scan time of 90-odd minutes (probably slower than Recuva, before it hung?). I'm sure it's not going to be as simple as that, especially based on your experiences so far; but because it's one-pass you should be able to gauge progress. The downside of course is that you can't recover files of any size with the trial version; so if you went ahead and you got grief at the recovery stage you'd be stung there.

Very handy stuff

Hi Ladbrooks I'm answering this from a camera perspective. On my Canon DSLR the only place to store an image is on a flash card. It will "take" photos (i.e. you can go through the motions) without a card but consequently there isn't anywhere to store the image. (I've turned that ability off on my camera exactly so that I can't "take" photos when there's no card present.) I've looked at specs for your camera and it seems to work on a similar principle. So it's not so much that the Recuva can't get your photos back, I think it's more a case of there not being any photos to get back!

Sorry Dennis, I didn't mean "oddities" . I know my system is set up "just so" too, and I don't like to add anything that doesn't blend in with that balance. But because my system is set up "jut so" and quite heavily tweaked, it is not "your normal system" ... those are its whimsical bits and I sometimes find that things designed to run against "your average build" just don't fit in. I take your point about the circumstances when you'd need this software. To some extent it's protection from myself . Sometimes I'll go off on a whim and find myself in new territory, and at least I'd know I was covered. If I was disciplined enough to use a VM then I might not have to worry about that. One thing that you raised that I need to look at questions whether you can still take a disk image. Indeed I should check compatibility with Reflect generally; like with its recovery console.

Yes the defrag is of the snaphots, not the HD. From the help file: If you have taken or deleted many snapshots, you need to defrag snapshots to reclaim free disk space and improve system performance. ..... For best system performance it's important to defrag snapshots and defrag them often. From what I can see the performance hit, particularly CPU, is negligible. The memory footprint isn't large. One thing that puzzles me is that in order to change which partitions are "protected" you have to reinstall. For example I originally installed with system partition protection only. If I want to add another partition I need to reinstall. Now that's not something you're going to do often, but I think the installation instructions should be a bit cleared about that! Go on Dennis, do tell Is because of the vagaries of your particular build, or have you had problems with it?

There are loads of search hits for the original problem (i.e. that specific "could not start" message) so it may be that if you could mount it externally, as you suggested earlier, you could even get it back to a bootable state. Some of the articles around reg hive failures suggest that may be a possibility. I guess I'm thinking it's worth bearing in mind it might not be that far off a usable system.

Ah yes of course; I hadn't thought of that. Losing all of the snapshots doesn't bother me per se; I would still be doing periodic image backups and when I want to defrag (which isn't often) I would just have to do it at the same time. Though I am a little surprised that they recommend you uninstall; I'd have thought just suspending the defrag, as per their steps, would have been quite adequate. And I'm always wary of license re-activation where there's a hardware dependency involved.

Hmmm thanks for that. I had just downloaded a trial of RollBack Fx. Looks neat so far. Of course the proof of the pudding ....... I'm hanging on to my "pre-RollBack" Reflect disk image for a while anyway

I've been trying this out on an old USB stick by copying pics over. I've tried both i) "wipe" where I've deleted the pics, and ii) a combination of "wipe" and "include" where the pics are not deleted. Generally, the files are beyond recovery. I say generally because I swear I went through one sequence where the files were recoverable; but I can't reproduce it. That may be because I used another program to securely wipe the free space and maybe that affected Recuva's behaviour (i.e. before I ran that program Recuva was able to recover some of the files it shouldn't have been able to). But unless I can reproduce that I have to say that I find ccleaner is doing its job. Just one question Mike; to confirm that you have been setting the "Wipe Free Space" check box on the Windows tab (step 2 in Andavari's link), as well as in "Settings"? I missed it the first time around

Ah!!! Thank you

I have never used Windows restore points, but the RollBack stuff goes much further anyway ... http://www.horizondatasys.com/169614.ihtml. I just like the idea that when I get one if those "Oh **** I wish I hadn't hadn't done that" moments I can get back to where I was in seconds rather than potentially hours. If you browse their site there's more useful info. I did find one review of RollBack which basically said it was excellent; the only gripe was that the restore time wasn't as quick as advertised. Though slowday444 didn't seem to find that to be a problem! The other feature that is really appealing to me is that you can access the restore points before you load Windows - there shouldn't be many issues this thing can't deal with. I'm seriously tempted!!

Mike have a look at this ... http://docs.piriform.com/recuva/troublesho...secure-deletion ... particularly point 2. Have you actually successfully recovered any of these files?

So the files you want are across multiple folders (directories) then - one folder plus sub-folders. I take it from what you've said that you don't know the individual folder (directory) names - in order to do a bit at a time? Augeas that's an interesting little gem about cancelling stage 2. I've just been reading the Recuva documentation and Stage 2 only assesses "recoverability potential" - superfluous for the OP since the files are known to be intact. So that would save a helluva lot of time! [[ Going off on a complete tangent for a sec (and not aimed at you Fran) the Recuva "Technical Information" section should be compulsory reading for anyone on these forums with deletion / recovery problems ... very misunderstood area! ]] Sorry Fran just to confirm; you have tried the path option in Recuva? I had originally assumed the answer to that question was "yes, but you wanted to limit Stage 1 and 2 as well as the results". I did a test recovering a single folder containing 340,000 deleted files - though obviously I couldn't simulate your 15,000,000 total deletions. Cancelling Recuva after Stage 1 caused no issues and the file list displayed without problem. I also started the recovery off and it didn't seem to have any problem handling the list size (it would have taken longer than I was prepared to wait for it to finish so I cancelled it). But I'm thinking that if you can identify the right folder(s) then you may be okay. Incidentally "Active@ File Recovery" has a tree view pane like Windows Explorer, so if you have forgotten or don't know what the folder names are, that might be a useful way of identifying the folder names to feed into Recuva. And to the Recuva devs ... how a tree view ? Absolutely wot Augeas says! As an aside, is your RAID a stripe or a mirror? If it was a mirror I was wondering out of curiosity whether you were going to take one disk out as a "back up".

I should imagine most programs struggle with those sorts of numbers The easier way to tackle it might seem to be to try and do it in smaller chunks, as you've already suggested. Though the problem I assume that you've encountered with the folder scan is that you might at first think that "one folder" seems a smaller place to search ... but files in that folder could be all over the place so you still have to initially scan the whole partition in order to filter out matches on "your folder". Did you actually try that though? Since I assume it would "filter as it went along" you might still only get a relatively small result set. Unless of course by "single directory tree" you are also saying "single folder" ... in which case the whole folder argument goes out of the window as a way of splitting the files into chucks ..... and you need to try something else ..... These guys also do various bits of recovery software. I've used their stuff and their Active@ File Recovery can work by specifying various attributes; file sizes / dates (created, modified, accessed, deleted) and filename extensions/wildcards. So you could try that for piecemeal recovery too - not everything at once. Again, it will always mean scanning a whole partition though. Their stuff isn't free like Recuva, but you could run the scan on the trial version and at least see if it finished.

I'd call 'em "cheat" cookies

Hi Caramel I just came across this article http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/you...es-think-again/, and then remembered I'd seen a post on here ... which turned out to be yours. Firstly bear in mind I'm not an experienced ccleaner user, but from what I can see ccleaner does delete (at least) those files mentioned in the article. Note the link at the bottom of the article that references ccleaner . I tried it on my own machine and with "Adobe Flash Player" setting ticked the on the Cleaner "Applications" tab, the SOL files in subdirectories of the "Macromedia\FlashPlayer\#SharedObjects" folder mentioned in the article were indeed removed.

Oops, sorry Picablu - I didn't mean to "talk" over the top of you My parents are late 70s but sadly weren't able to make the leap to really using a PC ..... just a little bit too intimidated by it. I'm impressed that you've moved to Vista ... it sure scares the hell outa me

Ah, you'll be using Microsoft binary then I think they're bringing it into line with everyone else sometime next year ... in which case it actually works out at 46 Never mind though - in hex I'm 30 again in 18 months

Sorry ... should read check-box text. Yeah Augeas, marmite was a bad choice ... some people ask "is it beacuse people either love you or hate you" ... I say no it's just 'cos I like marmite Back on topic, I also appreciate what you mean about familiarity ... once you've used the app just once or twice you soon pick up on quirks like that; it's just that initial view that throws you (well, me, anyway!).

Ah - I see know that you were saying (I think) that "grey box plus text = disabled" but "in ccleaner the check-box isn't greyed out". Your graphic makes that clear. Maybe it's just the visual style of this particular interface - I don't know what ccleaner is built in. To reiterate, the conventions I'm used to (and possibly the OP) are different. When I saw the interface for the first time, my first thought when I saw the greyed out text was "why are those options disabled? I didn't "see" the non-greyed check-box. You might say "look harder". I'm just pointing out that this is my user experience of ccleaner and this is my feedback on the interface. The "caution" argument doesn't hold water for me though. I have never seen greyed out (non-default) text next to any control to imply any sort of warning to a user. Any such warnings, IMHO, should be more explicit in the first place. Moreover, on the first tab, the text for every single option is greyed out until it is checked. Two points there: 1) If they are all "use with caution", there's no value to having them all greyed out in the first place and there should be some other warning. 2) If you check an item, the text is "normal". How do you know if it's a "use with caution" option without unchecking it again to see? The only place that I can see (in my admittedly quick) look through ccleaner where any check-box isn't greyed out by default is in the "Advanced options"! If greyed-out text is meant to flag "caution" then in my opinion i) it doesn't work and ii) it is not the right approach. Going by the first tab, it would be akin to saying "use the whole app with caution"; which in turn devalues its usage. I'm not "arguing" with you ident, nor point-scoring; I'm just trying to understand the whys and wherefores of ccleaner. Neither am I claiming rights and wrongs. In my experience of Windows GUI development this is not a practice I have seen used; perhaps your experience suggests otherwise and I'm not here to disagree with that

I'm 101110

I'm another Reflect fan . I hadn't heard of it 12 months ago, then I tried a free version that came with a PC mag. Now I'm a big fan and have a licensed version, having ditched Acronis which although good, I felt was too much "bells and whistles". Reflect is good value, clean and quick. My system partition has 42Gb of data and backs up to 25Gb in about 26 mins, with AES and medium compression. Though I usually verify on top and that can take a while. The Horizon DataSys stuff looks pretty cool too ... might have a play with that

Or maybe not. I can't see why this shouldn't work; but I can't get it to play ball on my test user . Maybe the way that ccleaner determines "the current user" means this isn't feasible.