recovery

Apple's iOS 5 sure does have its problems, doesn't it? (Too bad the recent iOS 5.0.1 update didn't fix most of them.) My wife's iPhone 4S, for example, definitely suffers from the no-audio-on-outgoing-calls bug. And my mom lost all her Camera Roll photos after installing iOS 5 a couple weeks ago.

Let's talk about the latter problem, which can definitely cause a panic if you have no backup of your iPhone or iPad snapshots. (And, let's face it, most users don't.) One minute, you have dozens or even hundreds of photos; … Read more

In the quest to get more oil from the ground, Glori Energy is enlisting microbes.

The Houston, Texas-based company today filed to go public on the stock market in a bid to raise $115 million with a biotechnology designed to extract more oil from existing wells.

Well more than half of the oil in oil wells typically stays trapped underground because conventional techniques can't reach it all. About 10 percent to 15 percent of available oil can come out based on pressure. Then drillers flood wells with water in one well to help push the oil out of a … Read more

Computer experts will tell you of the importance of performing regular backups to save your personal or work-related data in case of a system failure. Simple backup methods such as burning the data to a CD are perfect for archiving data that you put on your computer, but less effective when it comes to backing up installed programs. Installed programs usually require product keys to prevent software piracy or copying, and a misplaced or illegible key can lead to software becoming unusable to you in the event of a crash. Fortunately, NirSoft has a product that can retrieve the product … Read more

Picture this: your laptop is gone. Stolen. Someone broke into your home or office and made off with it. That's not only a pricey piece of hardware down the drain, but also some potentially irreplaceable data.

This happens all the time. My poor mother-in-law had two laptops stolen from her home just a few months ago. They're easy--and popular--targets for thieves. (Laptops, not mothers-in-law.)

If only your abducted PC could call the cops and rat out the crook. That's exactly the idea behind LoJack for Laptops, which, like its automotive-based forebears, helps track and recover stolen systems.… Read more

As anyone who has broken a bone knows, keeping up with physical therapy post-injury can be painful and annoying, and without a clear way to gauge progress, the regimen is as tempting to avoid as a bland diet.

Recent Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design graduate Pedro Nakazato Andrade hopes to keep people motivated--and thus improve recovery time--via a prototype cast that employs electromyographic sensors, which measure the electrical activity produced by a muscle when it moves.

Called "Bones," his cast prototype can keep a running tally of how much the injured area is being exercised.

The idea behind the design is rooted in the idea behind weight loss programs such as Weight Watchers: people who can track their progress using real, hard data are more likely to stay motivated and keep doing what they have been told to do.… Read more

With OS X Lion, Apple bucked the traditional method of releasing software on a physical medium, instead opting to release Lion through the Mac App Store. This is convenient for many, but it does not sit well for those who prefer to have a physical way to fix problems down the road.

Here's how to use a tool Apple just released to create a Lion Recovery HD on a USB drive.… Read more

Apple releases a tool to automatically create recovery disks for Mac OS X Lion, researchers at the Black Hat hackers conference say that you should change all of your passwords if your laptop gets stolen, and the BlackBerry Colt will be the first QNX-powered smartphone from Research in Motion in early 2012.

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

One of the hot topics regarding OS X Lion has been the lack of a physical installation drive that be used in troubleshooting problems and to recover or reinstall the operating system. We have reported extensively on this and the options for handling it, which have included mirroring the Lion recovery partition on an external drive, and creating your own Lion installation disk from the Lion installer that you download from the Mac App Store.

Apple has apparently taken people's concerns to heart, and has released a Lion Recovery Disk Assistant tool that you can use to create your … Read more

Apple's OS X 10.7 Lion operating system by default reconfigures your main boot drive to contain a small 650MB recovery partition that, like the original OS X installation DVDs, contains options to fix problems with your OS installation or reinstall the OS if necessary. While the OS will set up this partition on most systems, the installer may not be able to configure the drive with the recovery partition for some setups (especially those running RAID or custom partitioned drives). People with these setups have been concerned about the lack of an official recovery drive option for their … Read more