Recent malwares hits on Mac OS X

Mac has always been a very secure and virus-free operating system. But in the past, attackers and hackers have tried to infect Mac and stole user's personal and confidential information. Recently, Mac got hit by an attack, a variant of 'LuckyCat' virus, that took advantage of Microsoft Office Word to hack into the user's system and steals away with the important information and data stored on the hard drive. This was not the first time Mac was targeted by a backdoor virus. They had been targeted by many viruses and malwares in past too and some of them are listed below.

List of virus and malwares that attacked Mac OS X:

Patient zero:

In Mac, file extensions are not visible on thumbnails so it will be easy for a virus to masquerade easily by depicting as some other file type. The patient-zero virus turned up in 2004 using this technique.

RSPlug.A:

This virus becomes active in 2007 and it is used basically to get user login information of different sites like paypal and ebay.com. This virus pretends to be a quicktime codec and when user clicks to install it, a DNS server gets installed which takes them to a fake site of ebay and paypal.

MacGuard:

It was a phishing attack that came into action in 2008 which tells Mac users that their Mac is corrupted and you need to install 'MacGuard' to protect Mac. But in reality this was a attack to steal users credit card details.

Flashback virus:

Flashback virus affects Mac in september, 2011. This virus pretends to be an installer of the Adobe flash player and affected Mac when users installed it thinking as adobe flash player. When the user started this infected application, virus started executing the code and sent the user personal information to remote server. You can get more info about this on http://data-recovery-tool.blogspot.in/2012/07/how-flashback-virus-affected-mac.html.

But still Mac is far safer than Windows which gets easily vulnerable to viruses and malwares but it's not fully protected and safe. It is advisable to install a good antivirus on your Mac.

Pros and cons of cloning a hard drive

Disk cloning is the process of creating the exact working replica of a hard drive onto an external hard drive. After creating clone of a hard drive or volume the clone can be used immediately. Clone is a backup of data but there is a difference between backup and cloning. In backup we just save the content or data to a diferent location without worrying about the system.

Benefits of cloning hard drive:

• Creates an accurate replica of the source HDD making it a ready-to-use copy.
• If a virus/malware corrupts Mac then simply delete the corrupted system and use its clone to replace it.
• If somehow the system gets damaged then, cloned copy of the system will help to restore everything back.
• In the event of purchase of the new hard drive, you just need to have a clone of the previous Mac hard drive and use it to move all the previous data onto the new hard drive.

Negative aspects of cloning hard drive:

• Cloning is a time-consuming process. May take hours to copy the content of a large hard drive.
• To make a clone there must be an alternative hard drive available with you. So, it is very costly.

For complete cloning and backup solutions of the hard drive you can trust Stellar Drive Clone utility. This tool is a complete packgae for drive cloning, drive imaging and restoration of volume from folders or image file.

Main features of this tool are:

• Cloning of hard drive and volumes
• Cloning of SSD drives to Mac hard drive.
• Supports HFS, HFS, FAT and exFAT file systems.
• Cloning of hard drives formatted with MBR(Master Boot Record) partition map scheme.
• Imaging of the Mac hard drive or volume. In imaging this tool skips the bad sectors and creates image for good sectors only.
• Resizing of the destination hard drive in case the destination hard drive has space left after cloning.This tool resizes the volume on the destination hard drive and make the free memeory usable.
• Restore feature of this tool provides facility to restore data from the clone in case of data loss.
• If Mac crashes and fails to boot then for this condition this tool provides a faeture to create a bootable DVD that will boot the system.
• It has a very striking feature of creating the minimal system having only the necessary system files needed to operate the Mac.

Clone of HDD should be created using only the quality tool and this tool has so many striking features that makes it to stand above in the crowd from different cloning software available in the market. 

Why and How to partition a Mac hard drive?

Do you have a single partition on your Mac hard drive? If yes, then it is time to partition the hard drive for its effective and safe use. Partitioning the hard drive will provide many advantages over a single partition hard drive.

Pros of making partition on hard drive are:

Multiple OS installation:

In single partition you can install only one operating system, so creating partition will facilitate you to install more than one OS. You can install as many operating system as much the number of partitions.

Easy Troubleshooting:

If you have encountered any problem with the Mac then troubleshooting will be easier and effective in multi-partition hard drive. Checking of the individual partitions will provide the good view of the problem on your Mac. You can easily Verify and Repair Mac volumes separately.

Protection of data in the event of OS corruption:

If anyhow due to any reason like virus, malware, deletion of system files, etc. operating system gets corrupted and then the data in the volumes other than the boot volume will be safe. There is no need to format the data in the other volumes, you just need to reinstall the OS to fix the problem.

Easy searching of data:

Searching will be easy in case of multi-partition drive environment because we have prior idea about the saved location of the particular files. It will be a lot easier if we search in that particular volume only. The same can be a tiring task if we have to look out for a file in one large Mac hard drive.

Cloning and organization of data or volume will be easy:

It is obvious that we need less time and effort to organize small data effectively as compared the large amount of data. We can also clone volumes having important data inspite of making clone of the whole hard drive as it will be very time and memory consuming.

These all reasons counts to the benefits of creating partitions on the hard drive. Partition can be created either at the time of OS installation or if you want to create partition in the installed system then it can be done by a third-party partition manager tool.

Partition operations can also be done using disk utility but it has some cons like it cannot shift partitions and cannot hide and reveal partition. To fulfill my partition needs I took help of the following software http://alternativeto.net/software/stellar-partition-manager/about.

12 free useful software for Mac

Did you recently switched from Win to Mac? Then you must be in search of software available for Mac. So here I am providing you the list of software, all free, that you can download and install easily. There are some useful utilities that will anyhow helps to ease your work on Mac. 

1.Firefox:

Mozilla firefox is one of the best web-browser available. It has many striking features that will make working on net much faster and safer. Latest version available is 14.0.1 and this updated version provides more security, faster browsing, add-on syncing, etc.

2. Google chrome:

Google chrome is a very simplified and easy-to-use browser developed by Google itself. It will save the favourite pages as thumbnails so that you just need to click on the thumbnail from the main screen to visit pages. Its also secure and faster than Mozilla Firefox. Google chrome is faster because it creates new process for each tab and also its startup is faster than firefox.

3.Adobe Reader:

Adobe reader is used to read all types of PDF files and format. You can download it from the official adobe site.

4.Dropbox:

Dropbox is the online backup and storage facility. You can backup and store data online in dropbox and can access it from anywhere using your dropbox account.

5. Evernote:

Evernote is used to store data and access it from anywhere and anytime by usingany device. Whenever you add something new or update your data, it gets synchronized automatically and will becomes accessible from anywhere using your account. Thereare two types of acounts in evernote i.e. Free and Premium.

6.iAntivirus:

iAntivirus is a very effective antivirus build just for Mac OS X. It keeps the system protected from Trojan viruses and malwares. It can be downloaded from Apple official website.

7.Quick Silver:

It is basically an app that provides access to everythingyou have on your Mac hard drive. Quick silver will find you data you need quicky using keyboard shortcuts.

8. Stellar Speedup Mac(Demo):

This tool speedups Mac by removing all the unused and unwanted files and applications. It removes all the junk files, cache & temporary files, unwanted widgets, uninstall unused applications. It will boost up the Mac performance and processing speed. Its demo version is available free and to get full access to this amazing cleaning tool you need to buy it. But in my opinion its totally worth buying this product.

9.VLC media player:

You must have used VLC player on windows system. This tool has the same functionality on Mac too. It can play audio - video files. It has a very user-friendly interface and it supports more video formats than any other player.

10.Transmission:

This app is used to download the torrent files. It is a very little but effective tool for torrent download.

11. The Unarchiver:

This tool will allow you to unarchive the different types of archive files. It is very simple and easy to use. It supports many languages and supports almost every type of archive file.

12. iStumbler:

iStubmbler is a very useful tool to find and manage the wireless connections and provides plugins for finding airport network, bluetooth devices, etc.

All the above mentioned apps will surely going to ease your work and make experience of working on Mac hassle-free.

7 Essential tips to make a Mac works faster

Mac systems normally possess fast processing speed and a very good performance status as compared to the Windows or other operating system. But on some occassion its high speed and performance may degrade because of few or more reasons. The possible reasons for the poor performance of the OS X can be summed up as:

• Unorganized desktop
• Keeping too may widgets on dashboard
• Accumulation of junk files, temporary files etc.
• Low hard drive memory
• Many unused running applications
• Animated desktop
• Corruption of files.

So Mac performace can be decreased because of the above mentioned factors and for that we need to take some steps to optimize the performance of Mac.

Tip 1: Adding more RAM:

To increase the processing speed you can add more RAM to Mac OS X. Add the maximum acceptable RAM by your Mac. On the MacBook models you can use maximum 4 Gb RAM but on MacBook Pro you can install upto 8 Gb RAM.

Tip 2: Organize your hard drive:

You can increase the Mac performance by properly orgainizing the hard drive and creating suitable partitions on your hard drive. You can also switch to new advanced SSD hard drives, having higher processing speed.

Tip 3: Maintain free space and remove unused files and data:

Mac operating system use virtual memory a lot to process the task required. For that you need to have sufficient free space on Mac. Regularly delete all the unused files, trash, junk files, unused applications, unwanted plugins & widgets, cache or temporary files. You can use a third party software like Stellar Speedup Mac, ccleaner, etc. to delete all the unused and unwanted files and data effectively and automatically.

Tip 4: Remove the applications as a Start-Up app:

If many applications are automatically starting-up when the Mac bootup then this can cost the performance of Mac. All the unused applications will use the processor's speed and can degrade the system performance. So disable the auto-startup feature of the applications installed on Mac.

Tip 5: Make Dock less crowdy:

Dock takes a lot of processing and memory space, so avoid adding too many apps in the dock.

Tip 6: Keep dashboard minimal:

Remove any unwanted widgets from dashboard. Dash board applications are normally small in size but it keeps on running in background when not in use. So, these apps are eating up the processors speed.

Tip 7: Permission repair after installing a new software:

After the installation of a new software you should run the 'Verify disk permission' from disk utility. It may happen that your permission settings has been compromised by the newly installed software. So running 'Repair disk permission' will allow you to change permission settings to the previous one.

All the above mentioned tips will surely going to optimize your Mac performance and will make it process much faster than before. For any other query related to Mac you can write to me on tomaddison19@gmail.com

Reasons of creation of bad sectors in hard drive

Are you unableto access a part of the data or the entire file from your hard drive? If yes, then it may be because of the corrupted HDD sectors and we call these corrupted/damaged sectors as Bad sectors. Bad sectors are that portions of the hard drive that becomes unusable for storage purpose due to any permanent damage. The damage can be both logical as well as physical.

We cannot repair a bad sector but it can be marked as unusable by OS and then it will not use these marked sectors for data storing purposes. If you had previously stored data on volume whose sectors have gone corrupted or damaged, then possibility of accessing the data becomes very negligible. Although many data recovery software claims to regain data even from a hard drive having bad sectors.

Following reasons can be summarised for the creation of Bad sectors:

• If Mac OS was not properly shut down then it can lead to creation of bad sectors on hard drive.
• Virus and Malwares can also be responsible for creating bad sectors. Viruses and malwares can corrupts and damage the data and the sectors in HDD.
• Physical damage in hard drive can also be the cause behind the bad sectors.
• Bad sectors can also be created because of hardware problems like a bad quality processor fan, faulted data cables, etc.

Types of bad sectors:

Hard bad sector: 
Hard bad sectors can occur because of the physical damage on the hard drive. If read/write head comes in contact with the physical portion of the drive than it can lead to damage of the head and thus can results in creation of bad sectors. If the hard drive gets exposed to extreme environment conditions or it has faulty mechanical parts then bad sectors will be created.

Soft bad sector:

These type of bad sector creates whenever the error correction code on a sector mismatches with the content of the same sector. This can occur due to some logical error or error caused by viruses. This error has no relation with the physical error.

Recovery of data from bad sectors is very difficult but some third-party data recovery softwares can recover partially from bad sectors. No tool can recover 100% data from the bad sectors but recovery may be done to some extent only. I personally suggest to use Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery for recovering data from drive having bad sectors. This tool will recover all data from good sectors and partially from the bad sectors too.

7 Striking features of iPhone 4S to die for

iPhone 4s is one of the most advanced phone in today's world. It has all the exciting featured that makes it to call a 'Super Phone'. The main features of iPhone that makes it one of the most desirable phone for everybody are Siri, A5 dual core chip, iSight, iOS, iCloud, retina display, etc. It also has many impressive and astonishing in-build apps.

Features of iPhone 4S:

Siri:

Siri is basically a voice translater that translates everything you speak to your iPhone. You can write and send text messages, add reminders, use internet, schedule meeting, attend phone calls and many other things using siri. Siri can also answers to your queries using voice command. So Siri is like a assistant who takes care of all the commands you give and will manage all your calls, logs, messages, emails and almost everything in iPhone by just using voice command.

A5 dual core chip:

Apple iPhone 4S has a dual core A5 chip that gives it a long battery life and makes its graphics look extra-ordinary. You can feel the power of A5 Processor while using the iPhone 4S. This chip gives iPhone 4S two times more battery life and also makes graphics seven times faster.

iSight camera:

8 mega pixel camera of iPhone 4S, which is 60% more than the iPhone 4, makes images looks as lively as real. High resolution and advanced optics makes it the best camera that a phone has ever had. Whether used in dark or light, the photos looks astonishingly good. It has LED flash too that comes into action when needed. A5 chip and iOS processor are the main reason behind the amazing quality of iSight camera.

High quality videos:

With this phone you can make 1080p HD videos, that will give your videos very realistic and memorable look. iMovie feature of iPhone 4S will allow you to create a movie, download movie from the App store. It will automatically adjust the lighting effect whether you are making video in excess light or in no light. You can have non-blurring videos even if the focussing object is moving continously. With iMessages you can make movie in the messages app and then send it directly from there to any of your friends.

iOS:

The new updated operating system in the iPhone 4S makes its processing faster and in addition it provides many new amazing features too. The new advanced OS is much secure too as it will not allow any website or apps to access information from other apps. As iOS is based on OS X so it is very fast and stable operating system that provides good user-interface as well as a long battery life.

iCloud:

With iCloud you can store data online and can access the data anywhere you want. You can access the data from either of the Mac devices i.e. Mac book, iPhone, iPad. So its like, take a photo or video from one of your iOS device and access it from any other device. You just need to save photos, videos, music and all other files once in iCloud and access any of the files where ever you want by using any of the iCloud devices.

 Retina display:

With retina display everything looks so much astonishing and crystal clear. Retina display makes it a highest resolution phone ever. iPhone 4S has four times more pixels embedded in the 3.5 inch screen than in iPhone 4. Retina display uses a technology IPS(in-plane switching) which is used in Apple LED cinema display and iPads.

So iPhone 4S is equipped with all these features and that makes it one of the best and desirable phone to buy.

Find out how important it is to clone your drives & volumes

Almost all Mac users used to save their important data and documents in Mac hard drive or in external HDD (Very Few). Saving data in external HDD is as important as you save your money in bank for security purpose, so in future you can use it. There is no doubt that data is more important than money today and lots of people don’t even care about it. Data protection is not a rocket science you just need to take backup of your important data via cloning, imaging or simply copying data into the external hard drive.

I have a Mac Mini OS X 10.7.2 at home and take regular backups on an external hard drive. My brother who also shares the same system doesn't care about taking proper backups. He believes that Mac is a very robust and secure operating system so there is no need to clone.

However, one day while he was doing some office work, the Mac got crashed suddenly. He tried to start the Mac but it failed to boot. When I returned home from vacation and got to know about the system crashed, I desperately tried to switch on the system but all my efforts went in vain. Hard drive was making a tickling sound and this sound shows hard drive is physically damaged and inaccessible. So I told my brother not to switch on Mac now as it can do more damage to HDD.

I could have lost all the data if I haven't created clone of Mac in the external HDD. I bought a new HDD for my Mac and after configuring it I started recovering data from the clone of previous hard drive. Thereafter recovering data, my brother was very much happy to see all his office documents back and now he understood the reason behind creating clone of hard drive.

Clone should preferably be created in the different hard drive or an external hard drive, so that it can be used in the event of an inaccessible Mac. There are some very effective cloning software available in the market. But I used Stellar drive clone as I found it cheap and reliable. To get information about the cloning software you can go through the review sites like http://www.toptenreviews.com/, http://www.cnet.com/, etc.

Reasons for an unmountable drive in Mac and how to recover data?

We create different volume to save different file types like system files, user files. etc. So a separate volume is created for system related files, user files and software files. Saving files in different volume will allow Mac OS X to manage and operate on the files easily and quickly. To get information regarding a volume, its corresponding file systems needs to be mounted after booting Mac. It is the responsibility of OS X to mount drive first to gain access to the data in the volume.

But sometimes due to some error the drive fails to mount and the possible reason for a drive to get failed to mount are:

• Problem in the file system. File systems might have got corrupted or some files are missing from the files system due to which it is unable to mount.
• Sometimes improper shut-down is also responsible.
• Failure of hardware can also be the reason for unmounting of hard drive.
• Software corruption can also leads to the hard drive failing to unmount.
• Bad sectors in hard drive sometimes makes it unable to mount.
• Physical damage in hard drive don't allow a hard drive to mount.

Unmounting of hard drive makes it inaccessible and we will not be able to access data stored in hard drive. We may lose all data stored in the hard drive.

In this type of situation we can use a data recovery tool to peform data recovery from the unmountable volumes. There are many data recovery tools available in market that will allow to do recovery of data from an unmounted hard drive.

You can choose the data recovery tool as per your requirements. We should opt for the software which is easy to use and effective to work. Just download the software and install it on Mac.

If the unmounted drive is a external drive then make sure it is properly connected to the Mac.

Then we need to select the drive from the list of drives in the software's interface and run the scanning process to recover data from the unmounted drive.

Protect your hard drive and avoid data loss

Hard drive is one of the most important part of a computer system. It is used to save, read and write the data that we want to store for future use. Hard drive has all the applications that we have installed and most importantly hard drive has the operating system. So error in hard drive can make a huge data loss to us.

There can be a many reasons for crash or error in a hard drive like a physical defect or a logical defect.

What happens when a hard drive gets a logical defect?:

Logical defect in a hard drive occurs when their is problem with the file system or with the boot master of the system. When the file system or master boot gets affected then we can say that hard drive has logical defects. When your Mac is not booting up or it starts loading and gets shutdown during loading then their is a problem either with the file system or the boot master of Mac.

Viruses can also affect the file systems. They can corrupt or damage the files of the file system.

To know more about file system error you can check link http://data-recovery-tool.blogspot.in/2012/07/how-to-resolve-file-system-error-on-mac.html.

Firmware corruption of the hard drive:

This error can occur if their exists any defects in the code which controls the hard drive. If the firmware becomes corrupted or defected, the hard drive becomes unreadable to the computer. Hard drive will spin but the system will not boot up if its firmware gets corrupted. And even if the system starts booting it will hang in between the process.

Electronic Failure of hard drive:

Electronic failure can occur if the controller board of the hard drive gets defected. Problem in the controller board of the hard drive makes it undetectable to the BIOS. Because of this failure, system will unable to boot.

Physical defects in hard drive:

Physical defects in the hard drive makes it inaccessible to access. We may get to know that hard drive is physically defected if hard drive makes a ticking or clicking noise. Physical defects can also cause a huge data loss to us.

If we got affected with any of the above mentioned defects then we should use the data recovery methods to recover data. There are many firms that are providing the data recovery services. To get the best data recovery services I recommend to check this link http://data-recovery-software-review.toptenreviews.com/.