A new ransomware variant targets Zimbra servers — but doesn’t demand a direct payment for decryption.  The ransomware, dubbed MalasLocker by BleepingComputer, began affecting Zimbra users in March 2023. It encrypts emails, adding a message that reads:  This file...

Modern hard drives use S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) metrics to forecast hardware failures.  In most cases, home computer users don’t need to worry about S.M.A.R.T data — but if your hard drive seems to be operating at slow...

If you’re hit by ransomware, you’re certainly not alone. By one estimate, 2,708 ransomware attacks occurred from April 2022 to March 2023 — but since many attacks aren’t reported, the true number is much, much higher. When a ransomware infection...

When you’re digitizing a large number of videos, you’ll need to choose an appropriate format for the digital files.  Most video formats use compression, which reduces the data (and consumes less space on your storage media). Without compression, a single...

The market for solid-state drives (SSDs) was valued at over $30 billion in 2022 — and it’s continuing to grow, for somewhat obvious reasons.  SSDs are much faster than traditional hard drives, more resistant to physical damage, and capable of...

At Datarecovery.com, we discourage the use of data recovery software. Software can exacerbate issues like hard drive head crashes, potentially causing permanent damage (and preventing a successful recovery, even if the drive is treated in a professional data recovery laboratory). ...

Seek error rate is a hard drive performance metric reported through Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART) tools.  Hard drives, solid-state drives, and other storage devices use SMART to monitor for issues that may indicate an impending failure. For hard...

A hard drive’s seek time is the time that the head assembly takes to travel to a specific track on the platters where data can be stored. Since seek time varies depending on which track it needs to access, “seek...

Recently, MaxDigitalData began selling a 14 terabyte (TB) hard drive on Amazon and other online platforms for about $120 USD. That’s an incredible deal — but as is often the case with budget storage media, there’s a catch.  As TechRadar...