DIY Drive Recovery

We’ve all been there!

Ever need to quickly show someone something but you don’t want to deal with logging in an important box?

InstantServer.io creates a server on-the-fly for 35 minutes. Perfect for quick sessions with friends, particularly when coupled with something like screen

From their website:

What is this?

Click the button to get a virtual private server.

Specs?

Ubuntu 13.04, 64-bit, 614 MiB of RAM, 8 GiB storage. It’s an ec2 micro instance.

What’s the catch?

The server gets destroyed after 35 minutes. You can pay to keep it longer.

When would I use this?

Among other reasons, perhaps:

• You need another computer to test something quickly
• You need to install and use a utility for one thing, and don’t want to clutter your own environment
• You need a vanilla environment to get something to build and run properly
• You need linux but accidentally used windows

Why shouldn’t I just spin up an ec2/rackspace/linode instance?

They all make it slower and more difficult than it should be.

xxcopy is a flexible command tool for moving files between Windows directories.  Perhaps its most powerful feature are the switches with predefined work flows (e.g. flatting all the files in sub directories into one).

Personally, I use it when consolidating sub directories.  e.g. when Photorec recovers files into folder.01, folder.02, folder.03, etc, you can use it to scan all the folders and then put in one folder.

e.g.

xxcopy d:\folder*.jpg e:\cosolidated /yy /sx