Recovering files

This happens to everyone at some point… a hard disk crashes and now you want to restore some files from it.

One utility I use is Recuva.

Even if you've formatted a drive so that it looks blank, Recuva can still find your files on it.

Keep in mind that restoring files is always a bit of luck and sometimes you are just out of luck.

For more recovery tools see also:

http://www.raymond.cc/blog/top-10-free-data-recovery-software/

For the real professionals among us, I would advice Testdisk. This is more for recovering lost partitions and if you are really interesting in getting deeper into data recovery check out http://lifehacker.com/5525534/recover-data-like-a-forensics-expert-using-an-ubuntu-live-cd

I hope you will be able to recover what you were looking for.

Good luck!

Terminating XMBC remotely on Ubuntu

Last few weeks I have been testing XMBC 9.11 Alpha/Beta on my Ubuntu Media system. Personally I think it is the best Media manager/player ever :).. But due to the fact it is still a beta release, the application sometimes does not respond or hangs and completely blocks the system.

The easies way to kill it and free your system without a reboot, is just open putty.exe and login remotely to your ubuntu system and issue the following command:

killall -9 xbmc.bin

This will terminate XBMC and will free your system. In my case I just restart XBMC :)