Facebook bought drop.io - File sharing will be the next Facebook feature

Facebook number one social networking website bought drop.io and closing down file sharing service by 15th of December. Facebook is really good at sharing picture but not the media files. This will make them strong in real time file sharing as well.

drop.io blog announced that most their service and assets including Sam Lessin were bought by Facebook.

"Today, we’re proud to announce that we’ve struck a deal with Facebook. What this means is that Facebook has bought most of drop.io’s technology and assets, and Sam Lessin is moving to Facebook."

In the coming weeks, drop.in will be winding down the their service. As of this week, people will no longer be able to create new free drops, but you’ll be able to download content from existing drops until Dec. 15. Paid user accounts will still be available through Dec. 15 and paid users will be able to continue using the service normally. After Dec. 15, paid accounts will be discontinued as well.

Please download your information before Dec. 15 – they plan to delete it after that time. No user data or content will be transferred to Facebook.

Soon you will be able to experience similar services from Facebook. We are still not sure is it going to be a free service or a paid service or what exactly Facebook plans with drop.io

Must Know Data Recovery Scenarios

Data recovery is the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. Wikipedia

Data recovery sounds like complicated and need more technical skills to accomplish it. Yes it can be such process in some cases like forensic data recovery. Most of the cases are fairly simple and you could have done it by user self or knowing the basics of data recovery methods can save your data well and money. To start with lets see what are the possible data recovery scenarios.

Simplest and most common situation can be recover deleted a file/files or folder. (undelete data recovery)

As soon as you have notice that you have deleted a file that should not be deleted STOP what you do with your computer.

Copying files or any other activity will override the deleted file and it will be complicated and costly task to recover the file. Reason behind it is even after deleting a file (from recycle bin) it will not erase from the hard drive and it can be recovered easily. By adding more files or copying files or performing some actions on on your computer can overwrite these deleted file.

Another common case of data recovery is due to operating system crash. You will have lost direct access to your files and folders as operating system dose not start.

Do not try to format your hard drive or reinstall operating system or run recovery disks.

You can easily get access to your files and folder using Live CD such as Slax. Slax CD will boot your computer without doing any changes to your hard drives and provide you a graphical user interface with all the needed functions.
Copy files to external hard drive and then you can install.

Then there might be quite possible cases with corrupting the hard disk file systems or hardware problems with the hard drive which will definitely look for professional data recovery companies or service. However, that is going to cost you a bit. First question to be asked is how much the data going to worth? Can I move forward without the data? and if you really think it is really really worth spending couple of thousands dollars then do not try anything to fix the problem but find a good data recovery company that suits your budget. Trying to start hard drive with problems can cause more damage to it and will cost more to recover data or make it impossible to recover it.

Lets move it further with more complicated methods and tools (Such as HELIX Forensic Data Recovery Tool ) that you can use to recover data in future posts.

Backup Your Files Then You Must Try SyncBack

Last post I looked into the important things that we need to finalize before taking backups. After you decide What, Where and When to take backups, you will require proper file backup software that will meet all your requirements. When it comes to personal use I would like a free, simple tool that will silently back up my files without giving problems.

SyncBack is a simple but powerful software that can be used to backup and synchronize files and folder. It can access files and folders from computers from your local area network(LAN) or wide area network(WAN). Also, it can backup your files to a FTP account. You can create many profiles to meet different requirements. For example you can create one profile to backup My Documents and another one to backup Music and Movie folders. Also, SyncBack can be used to synchronize files between two or more computers. Then you can schedule each profile, so it will backup or sync your file frequently. 


Full featured SyncBack is available to download for free. It Support Windows 7, Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2008, Windows 2003, Windows 2000, Windows 98, 98SE, ME, and NT 4.However Windows 95 is not supported.

After you download and install SyncBack make sure you create couple of profiles to suite the files you have decided to take backups. For example you can create profiles base on daily, weekly and monthly or base on the file location or file types. 


If you create profiles daily, weekly and monthly schedule them accordingly. It is wise to choose a time that you do not use your computer. So, backup process will run smoothly and it will not slow down your computer or internet connection. Also, it you run regular backups make sure you give enough time in between each run to complete. 

How to Play FLV (Flash Video) Files in Windows Media Player?

How to Play FLV (Flash Video) Files in Windows Media Player?

By default Windows Media Player (WMP) will not play flv and report that it does not have the correct codecs to play it.

There are two options (either of these two will work)

1) Downloading codecs package such as K-Lite . K-Lite is a tremendous codecs package that supports for various file formats such as 3gp, mp4 etc. Almost any movie format that you can think of or find on the internet, K-Lite will have a codec to play it. Installing the package will enable Windows Media Player to decode and play the file.

K-lite can be downloaded from here

2) Download a simple FLV plugin for Windows Media Player with no extra bells and whistles. The plugin is very lightweight and does exactly what it says - Plays FLV files and nothing extra.

PlayFLV plugin can be downloaded from here

How to download Torrents - in Easy steps

How to download Torrents - in Easy steps

1) Download mutorrent installation software. Click here

2) Install mutorrrent on your computer.

3) Go a torrent searching website. E.g. www.thepiratebay.org . There are several others. Do a google search for - Torrent search engine. Demonoid is quiet popular too but you will need an invite from existing member to become a member. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE IF YOU WANT TO HAVE A DEMONOID INVITATION. I have given away the invitation code for free several times in the past.

4) Search for the file you are looking for

5) Download the torrent file

6) Open the torrent file using mutorrent you previously installed on the computer

7) Depending on the number of seeders (i.e number of people who has full copy of the file and are sharing ) the download speed may vary.


THIS IS ALL! Hope you will find this useful

[GuestPost] Better Ways to Use Files - Compress Files

Roguedeals is a new site founded in late '08. This Techie Deals and Reviews site is all about the push for collaboration and feedback from its users. They believe that with your input, the site will grow and prosper. They hunt for the very best deals on the Internet and give you a fresh take on it. Check out this excerpt from one of their latest posts..

Better Ways to Use Files

Your personal files are the most important data on your PC.

Windows can be reinstalled and software replaced, but your creations and personal affections cannot. They represent your time and effort so I am here to talk about the best ways to handle them.

This guide has a bunch of easy ways for you to save, organize, and manipulate files.

This guide will recommend an application to do each of these functions and explain why they are great if not best at it.

Compressing Files

7-Zip

http://www.7-zip.org/

License: free, open source

OS compatible: Windows, Mac; various flavors of UNIX

Features:

High compression format (7z file type)

Supports many compressed formats.

Zips files better than WinZip

AES-256 bit encryption capable

Self-extracting capable

Right click integration

File manager GUI

Command line options

Multi language support

Alternates: WinZip, PKZip

Hope you enjoy this weeks guest post and more about better ways to use files can be read at Roguedeals.com