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I use an external hard drive to backup the files on my C drive. Have had it for years. Turned it on this AM and it is blank. It is formatted but all the saved files (about 100GB) are gone. Poof. Can anyone help explain what happened? Thanks.

AUGUSTA, Ga. – A judge has ruled that a woman charged with leaking secrets to a reporter will remain jailed until her trial after prosecutors argued that she might possess more stolen intelligence and could try to flee the country. Winner worked for a U.S. government contractor in Augusta. She is a former Air Force linguist who speaks Farsi and Arabic. Prosecutors don't think Winner is a jihadist or terrorist sympathizer, they say that before she left the military, she inserted an external hard drive into a top-secret computer there. They say they don't know what happened to it or...

A Quick Question to computer Gurus- Just bought a Samsung 850 pro- I tried to restore an image to it, but Macrium Reflect would freeze at the "Attempting ssd Trim" stage- The stage right before the actual restoration/transfer of files- It wanted to perform this stating that it supposedly was 'good for extending the life of the drive' and said that even if windows had it's own trim operation, that it couldn't perform the same process as Macrium's install trim could- The only way I could do the actual restore, was to turn off the "SSD Trim" option in the...

I want to have two backups. One for the office and one for home. The office backup is a little Toshiba, which does very well. For the home backup I bought a Passport Ultra. I hooked it up to the machine to back up, using its own utilities and after 24 hours it had backed up less than 5%. I talked on the phone with the nice man from India. He made a suggestion. Another 24 hours. 5%. I brought it to Staples techs. They decided that it was probably encrypting everything and that is why it is taking so...

A FORMER NAVY SEAL who shot Osama bin Laden and wrote a bestselling book about the raid is now the subject of a widening federal criminal investigation into whether he used his position as an elite commando for personal profit while on active duty, according to two people familiar with the case. Matthew Bissonnette, the former SEAL and author of No Easy Day, a firsthand account of the 2011 bin Laden operation, had already been under investigation by both the Justice Department and the Navy for revealing classified information. The two people familiar with the probe said the current investigation,...

WASHINGTON - The National Archives lost a computer hard drive containing massive amounts of sensitive data from the Clinton administration, including Social Security numbers, addresses, and Secret Service and White House operating procedures, congressional officials said Tuesday. One of former Vice President Al Gore's three daughters is among those whose Social Security numbers were on the drive, but it was not clear which one. Other information includes logs of events, social gatherings and political records. Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper said in a written statement that the agency was preparing to notify affected individuals of the breach. The representative of former...

There have been dozens of questions surrounding the disappearance of emails belonging to former IRS official Lois Lerner, the woman at the center of the IRS targeting scandal. Some of Lerner's emails have been recovered, after IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said under oath they were lost forever. Thousands are still missing. But perhaps the most compelling questions that have been asked since the IRS targeting scandal broke in May 2013 are 1) Exactly where were Lerner's emails and backup tapes destroyed? 2) Who destroyed them? Now, we have an answer. According to Americans for Tax Reform,Lerner's hard drive was...

WASHINGTON (AP) — IRS employees erased computer backup tapes a month after officials discovered that thousands of emails related to the tax agency's tea party scandal had been lost, according to government investigators. The investigators, however, concluded that employees erased the tapes by mistake, not as part of an attempt to destroy evidence. As many as 24,000 emails were lost because 422 backup tapes were erased, according to J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. The revelation is likely to fuel conspiracy theories among conservatives who say the IRS has obstructed congressional investigations into the scandal. George...

The malware reprograms the hard drive’s firmware, creating hidden sectors on the drive that can only be accessed through a secret API (application programming interface). Once installed, the malware is impossible to remove: disk formatting and reinstalling the OS doesn’t affect it, and the hidden storage sector remains. “Theoretically, we were aware of this possibility, but as far as I know this is the only case ever that we have seen of an attacker having such an incredibly advanced capability,” said Costin Raiu, director of Kaspersky Lab’s global research and analysis team, in a phone interview Monday.

(Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world's computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives.

Seagate has hit a new storage milestone with its recently unveiled 8TB hard drive disk, the first of its kind to start shipping. The company calls this an "important step forward", saying its new offering meets the increasing data-heavy demands of our modern cloud-centric world. The new 8TB offering is a 3.5-inch drive, and the maker is hawking it at cloud providers and others revolving around bulk data storage. Said IDC's John Rydning, "Public and private data centers are grappling with efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital content." He points towards the 8TB drive as a solution for addressing...

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Monday made yet another request to the federal government for details about a crashed hard drive that may have contained information allowing criminal charges to be brought against a federal official. Issa’s newest letter concerns the hard drive of April Sands, a former employee at the Federal Election Commission who resigned in the spring after admitting to violations of the Hatch Act. That law puts restrictions on the ability of government officials to conduct political activities while on the job, or from government offices.

I was given the gift of a new laptop- HP Pavilion Smartouch 17. not my first choice, but it was a nice gift and the giver knew my old Toshiba Satellite L505-a6946 is dying and that I'm too cheap to buy a new one. The Satellite uses Vista and the new HP is Windows 8.1 . I need to know what's the best(easiest) way to move all my data from one to the other including AVG,Hitman Pro, Malwarebytes,emails(Outlook)and other vital programs. While I'm at it, I assume it came with all sorts of unwanted 'bloatware' so I will need to...

Scandal: The IRS canceled a contract with an email storage contractor weeks after Lois Lerner reported lost personal files and before other IRS officials had their hard drives crash as Tea Party-targeting investigations began. Timing is everything, the saying goes, and sometimes the timing of events is also very curious, as in the case of the lost emails of Lerner and at least six other officials at the very same time the IRS canceled its contract to back up and preserve those emails as required by federal law. Lerner's computer supposedly crashed in June 2011, an alleged event the IRS...

Then a giant dog stuck its head through the window and ate all the servers.You expect this kind of thing from Enron. You don’t expect it from the IRS. But as it turns out, there isn’t much difference. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed.Lois Lerner’s computer allegedly crashed in June 2011, just ten days after House Ways and Means Committee chairman Rep. Dave Camp first wrote a letter asking if the IRS was engaging in...

According to a report published late last night in POLITICO, the hard drive belonging to Lois Lerner where the IRS claims her emails to outside agencies and groups like the White House, Department of Justice, FEC, Democrat members of Congress, etc. were stored has been...destroyed. Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightening rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources. “We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the...

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa on Tuesday issued a subpoena to the Internal Revenue Service, ordering the agency to turn over the hard drive they claim is responsible for wiping out two years of critical email communications. Issa has dramatically widened his probe into the IRS after the agency announced last week that it had lost the emails, which may have provided information about an IRS policy of targeting for extra scrutiny and delay many conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

Seagate announced it is now shipping the world's fastest 6 TB hard disk drive (HDD) - the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v4. Boasting industry-leading performance, the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v4 is an important step forward in scale-out data infrastructures delivering supersize storage and enterprise reliability to meet the explosive growth of corporate and cloud-based data centers."Unstructured data growth is doubling exponentially and will propel the digital universe to reach 16 Zettabytes of data by as early as 2017. This will cause cloud service providers to look for innovative ways to store more within an existing footprint while lowering...

If you get new electronics for Christmas and want to pass your old ones to someone else, (snip) ..... Consumer Reports says it's important to remove your personal data before you get rid of any electronic device. "Everything from financial documents to photos, you want to make sure to delete all that information before you give it or sell it to anyone else," said Rich Fisco, Consumer Reports. On many tablets there are built-in ways to wipe your data. For example, on the iPad, go to Settings and selected "General." Look for the "Reset" option. In the next window, choose...

Back in the early 1980s I was a first-adopter and bought an AT&T 6300 PC. Believe it or not, it still fires up and runs (though the monitor fizzes now and won't display anything). It runs MS-DOS and had Wordstar on it. I backed up the work I had on that machine with both hard copies and floppy disks, (you young whipper-snappers might have heard of those), but they were all destroyed in a fire. Always intended to ask someone if there was a way to get the information off the old hard drive, but I kept thinking, "mañana," and...