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In a nut shell, the disk was a 120GB 3.5” 7200rpm IDE Maxtor drive, two years old. It was housed within an aluminium external drive case. It was hooked up to a standalone Windows XP computer. It was spinning, no unusual noises such as clicks or retry access sounds. The file directory could be read. The client had last successfully placed data on the medium less than 15 days before.
There are many sites with free, ad sponsored or paid for advice on how to design a pretty site. Many of these sites either directly host or have a link to web template sites. These templates carry a cost ranging from 0 dollars going all the way into the hundreds of dollars. A custom made site can bring up the cost of a solution into the thousands of dollars.
Yet Google a company with assets running into the billions and a profit and loss sheet with no traces of red on it has a simple white background with one 8Kb picture and less than twenty clickable items. For the record, Google does provide a hi-tech version consisting of practically the items described above on top of a picture of the user’s choice.
Why is it that a company that owns the absolute majority of all searches that take place can’t come up with a nicer interface? Lack of technical expertise? Can’t afford a good designer? I don’t want to waste your time asking other silly questions. The answer is that Google have based their computing model on three words: simplicity, functionality and focus.
All of Google’s solutions have no cluttering or confusing interface that came out of some study by some experts costing God knows how many millions. Google solutions have no weird options most of which came out of the necessity to make a new version available to paying customers. And Google solutions make what they do seem so simple that many of us may be mistakenly led to believe that what Google does can be done by pre-school kids.
Can the same be said about your backup solution? You do have a backup solution? For your own sake I’ll assume that you do. Does your solution make you wonder how you will go about retrieving your data if your working version becomes corrupted? Does your solution make you feel that you must get certified in order to use the product?
The next time you are out looking for a backup product, make sure that it has three basic ingredients: simplicity, functionality and focus.
From online backups to tape-drive articles! The latest generation of the LTO technology has some interesting features and since these relate to data backups, I decided to share a couple of thoughts with you!
The LTO (Linear Tape-Open) consortium has recently released the 5th generation of tape storage technology. It can store up to 3 TB of data if we assume a compression ratio of 2:1, it has data transfer speeds of up to 280 MB /s, it has a new partitioning feature and Linear Tape File System specification to provide enhanced file control and data management.
It includes two data partitions on the tape that support a tape file system, allowing files to be written directly to a tape and read by another computer, independent of OS or application. That is, we can say it is cross-platform capable and hence, truely portable!
Every solution has its two sides of the coin. We come across various marketing techniques that somehow define cloud computing in relation to the services they provide! In order to jump on to the cloud bandwagon and attract customers, some companies advertise their services as cloud services when in fact these are not! Therefore, what is cloud computing? – We define cloud computing as anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. Cloud services are categorized as, Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service or Software as a Service (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS). While, the name cloud, is the symbol used to represent the Internet in various technical and non-technical drawings.
Given the widespread success of virtualization, many SMBs rely exclusively on the inbuilt features as their main data protection plan and which may appear adequate at face value! One would need to see the overall picture! Virtual server based tools such as, snapshots and export/import utilities that are found in the major products, help organizations protect their data to a certain degree! It is not enough to backup data, being a clone or a file to the same virtual server. In fact, major manufacturers and their fellow partners provide a vast range of backup solutions that fulfill all requirements of a proper backup policy. With SMBs, the deciding factor may be costs! Do they have the budget to purchase such applications? However, for the unlucky IT techies that never manage to get their superiors buying these expensive products can still develop a similar mechanism. Using some basic scripting and inexpensive hardware they can build backup solutions similar to these expensive applications as they too, make use of the inbuilt or native tools found in the major virtualization products.
Are online backup and recovery solutions cheaper than the counterpart traditional solutions? Before I deal with this argument I would like to point out a few points: – online backups provide an offsite disaster recovery solution, you can access your data from anywhere given that you have an internet connection and additionally, you will be enjoying the expertise and the scalability of big vendors.
Online backups offer cheaper costs per GB for the same functionality because you only pay for what you use. :) The costs include the storage used, bandwidth consumed and other related services. Data security is based on the latest encryption algorithms and adequate auditing features would place the end-user’s mind at rest!
Internal hard drives: Hard drives are relatively inexpensive and efficient but they are prone to viruses or software corruption due to other software running on the system. You can’t store it in a location separate from your computer. You have to install it in another computer in case you have problems with the computer and you need to recover the backed up data.
External hard drives: An external hard drive can easily be attached to your computer using a USB port. External hard drives can be stored in a location that’s separate from your computer, which can help protect your backup. You need to connect it with your computer every time a data backup is done and is usually slower than internal hard drives. Read more »
I want to take the opportunity to wish you and your dearest the very best for the forthcoming year. Some places are already referring to the newly hung calendar while others have a few more hours to go before their 2009 almanac would have served its purpose.
Health, good fortune and prosperity are the common form of wishes we bestow upon one another. And since I do not want to break with tradition I would like to bestow them onto you. Yet with all of these there is little we can do to determine the outcome. What destiny has in stock for each and every one of us will be revealed at the appropriate time. Some of the wishes can be even considered to be dangerous. For example I would never suggest to a friend to take on gambling so as to increase her prospects of getting some good fortune.
Yet I can safely wish you a year without any loss of data. The simple trick is to backup your data regularly, ideally in a manner that is automated and does not necessitate you having to remember to do it. If the process is automated there is a great chance that you will succeed in not losing any critical information if your computer takes all the data with it when it dies out.
