How to recover deleted Gmail messages

By Martin Brinkmann on August 25, 2012 - Tags:Gmail, messenger

Things can go wrong when you are working with a computer or relying on a set of data, and it does not necessarily have to be your fault to begin with. Emails for instance can be deleted accidentally or on purpose, maybe by an ex-girlfriend, colleague or friend who somehow managed to gain access to your Gmail account. Other possibilities include a successful hacking attempt and a hacker who likes to be destructive, or a service provider issue.

Whatever the reason may be, if emails get deleted that you still need, you need to find a way to recover them. If you have followed my advice and created regular Gmail backups you can access the deleted emails right from within the program’s interface. The guide by the way explains how to backup emails from different providers including Hotmail.

If you have no mail backups you still may have a chance to restore your deleted Gmail messages, if the following requirements are met:

• Mails have not been deleted from the Gmail trash
• Less than 30 days have passed since the deletion

When you delete emails in Gmail they are not deleted completely but moved to the trash of the service instead where they are kept until they are deleted by the owner of the account, or after 30 days of being stored in the trash.

To check whether the emails that you want to recover are still in the trash, do the following:

• Open the Gmail homepage and sign into your account
• Locate the trash on the left sidebar. You may need to click on the more link before you see it.
• You can alternatively enter in:trash in the search to display it directly.

• If you find your deleted messages here, you can restore emails by selecting them and then using the move button to move the emails to the inbox or another folder.
• You can alternatively use the select all option to recover all emails found in the trash at once.

If the deleted messages are not found here, you can try the following alternative options to recover them:

• Try to search for them. Maybe the messages have not been deleted but only moved to another folder. By searching for the messages, you make sure that this is not the case.
• Check the All Mail folder which you find listed on the left sidebar. You may need to click on the more link before it becomes available here
• Check mail forwarding settings. While that won’t let you recover your emails, someone may have configured Gmail to automatically forward some or all messages to another email address.
• While you are at it, check filters as well to make sure that mails do not get automatically deleted because of filtering rules

As a last resort, you can try and post a support request on the official Gmail forum. Hotmail users can check out how to recover deleted Hotmail messages for similar instructions.

Taskbar Pinner: pin anything to the Windows Taskbar

By Martin Brinkmann on August 29, 2012 - Tags:Windows software, windows taskbar

Microsoft introduced an update to the taskbar of the Windows operating system in Windows 7. Major improvements included the ability to pin programs permanently on the taskbar for faster access and the new jumplist feature that you could use to access previously used files or initiate specific program related actions. For a mail program, you could for instance open the write a new message page directly to save some time doing so.

Windows 8 has the same taskbar features but without the operating system’s start menu that Microsoft has removed in the upcoming OS.

Microsoft for some reason has only implemented options to pin programs and executable files to the Windows taskbar. Workarounds are available to change that, so that you can pin files and folders or hard drives to the taskbar as well.

Taskbar Pinner is a freeware program for Windows 7 and 8 that makes this more comfortable.It ships with the following four options:

• Pin a file
• Pin a folder
• Pin a Shell location
• Pin a Library

You can either click on one of the options presented to you in the main program window, or drag and drop the files or folders that you want to add to the Windows taskbar into the program interface.

When you click on the shell location or library option, you get a list of available locations and libraries in icon form that you can add to the taskbar. Shell locations include Windows Update, Search, Network connections, Personalization, Favorites, Control Panel or Computer among a few dozen other options. You can even select multiple icons at once to speed up the process further.

If you prefer to have the pinning feature available in Windows Explorer, you can check the Explorer context menu option in the program window to enable it in the operating system’s default file browser. A right-click on a file or folder in Explorer lets you then add those to the taskbar. (viaVishal)

Backup Box: Move cloud hosted files directly between providers and servers

By Martin Brinkmann on August 29, 2012 - Tags:Backup

Sometimes you may want to move files hosted somewhere on the Internet to another server or provider. While you could download the files to your local computer – if you do not have a local backup available – to upload them again to the new server or provider, you sometimes however may prefer to transfer files directly between servers.

A core benefit of this procedure is speed. Your home computer’s upload and download speed is usually fairly limited in comparison to the speed of Internet servers, so that it should take less time to move the files. You may however run into issues as well, with trust being one of the most important ones. If you want server to server communication, you need to trust those servers with data so that they communicate with each other.

Backup Box

And it is the same when you look at the Backup Box service. The service’s core feature are direct server to server transfers between cloud storage providers such as Box, Google Drive, SkyDrive, SugarSync or Dropbox, as well as custom servers that can be accessed via ftp or sftp. You configure Backup Box to transfer files from one server or provider to another. Why would you want to do that?

• To migrate your files to another cloud hosting provider
• To backup your websites regularly
• To backup databases
• To safe time transferring files

You do need to authorize at least two services or servers before you can start using the service. As far as cloud hosting services go, you do not have to enter your username and password on the Backup Box site. You instead authorize the site on the cloud providers website so that it can access your data, and you can naturally revoke that authorization at any time as well. Only ftp, sftp and MySQL servers need to be authorized directly by adding an authorized user account to Backup Box.

Once you have added at least two services you can configure transfers between them. You have got the option to transfer all files, or only select files or folders to the new server or service.

And instead of transferring files directly, you can alternatively schedule transfers so that they are run regularly by the application. You could for instance backup your website on a weekly basis, or transfer the files from your Dropbox account to SkyDrive once a month.

Another interesting option is the archive and timestamp feature which zips the selected files during the transfer. That’s useful if you need to make room on a server or an account.

Free account users  are limited to transferring 1 Gigabyte of data per transfer using a maximum of 10 transfers in that time. Pro, premium and enterprise accounts are available that raise limits and make available additional features such as incremental transfers.

It usually takes minutes before the first files start to appear on the selected server or cloud hosting account you are transferring the files to.

As far as security goes, Backup Box states that it is using 256-bit SSL encryption whenever supported to transfer files, that it wont retain files on their servers, and that Amazon S3 is used with a AES 256-bit encryption for temporary storage.

One Gigabyte per month won’t take you far, especially if you are thinking about scheduling regular backups of your websites or data that you host online.

PasteAsFile: Save Windows Clipboard entries to files in Windows Explorer

By Martin Brinkmann on August 29, 2012 - Tags:clipboard, Windows software

I have been working on Enterprise systems in the past were users were not permitted to install or run third party software on. This was a big issue if you had to create screenshots for the Intranet or presentations, as you were left with using the print screen to save them to the Windows Clipboard, pasting them into Microsoft Paint, and doing your best to get the screenshot in the shape you wanted it to be before saving it as an image on the system.

PasteAsFile is a free program for Windows that you can use to save Clipboard entries right from within Windows Explorer. It is a specialized application that you may like for its versatility. That said, alternatives are available that may be more appropriate for specific jobs. To name just a few:  Clipboard Help and Spell, Phrase Express or ClipUpload.

PasteAsFile adds a new context menu entry to Windows Explorer during installation. To save Clipboard data to a file, you simply right-click any folder – including the Windows Desktop – and select the Paste as File option from the context menu. A window is opened when you select the option. If you do not want to make any modifications, you can simply tap on the enter key or click on ok to save the file using the suggested settings.

You can alternatively change the name of the file, the file extension, and even the location. The program supports several text and image formats, so that you need to change the file extension if you do not want to save the file in the default format. PasteAsText supports jpg, pcx, png, bmp, tga, gif and tif image formats, as well as txt, rtf, doc, html, php and various other text formats.

Especially the coding related formats may come in handy. Say you have found code on a website that you want to save to your computer. With PasteAsFile, you copy the contents from the website to the clipboard, right-click on your desktop or a folder in Windows Explorer afterwards, to save it directly to your computer in the appropriate format.

I’d like to see an option to define a default format for both image and textual contents. Other than that, there is little need for improvement.