Fantastic (Life Saving) Software
Here are a couple of outstanding pieces of software that I’ve run across lately. One is highly recommended because you need it. The other is highly recommended if you need it.
SyncBackSE from 2BrightSparks
You need to back up your data. Trust me on this, you NEED to do it. I’m on the tail end of a horrendous double-drive failure that’s costing me a ridiculous amount of money, time and effort. 
What’s worse is that I DID have a backup (mirrored drives), but the jobs to push the data off to a third location weren’t working.
One great way to do it is with SyncBackSE from 2BrightSparks. This one is a bit like Microsoft’s wonderful SyncToy v2.0 Beta, but is more “industrial grade” and has lots of flexibility that SyncToy doesn’t. It also handles huge, deep directories with aplomb, and can even back up TO or FROM an FTP connection or ZIP drive.
PC Inspector File Recovery from Convar
A fantastic little piece of freeware from a German company, PC Inspector File Recovery (despite the “Get Smart” sounding name) is a general purpose data recovery program. This is useful if you’ve deleted or formatted a disk, but I found it especially well suited to recovering pictures from a digital camera card that had spontaneously formatted itself. Out of 193 potentially lost pictures, PCIFR recovered all but 2 of them (and I had tried to recover the lost files using other tools to no avail). Best of all, it’s free!
