Archive for March 2010
Upgrading Your Server
Tech Republic has a great server upgrade list of things to think about before you start the big task. The article starts off with the most important step – backup. The real key is to make sure you not only have the data, but everything on the server.
When upgrades go south, disk images can help recover not only data but a server’s complex configuration in a hurry.
If a server upgrade is in your near future, check out this great list, and make sure you start out with ShadowProtect Server (or ShadowProtect Small Business Server). The Hardware Independent Restore (HIR) technology helps make upgrading your server much easier. You can use HIR to migrate to new hardware or even virtual hardware without worry.
If you’re planning a server upgrade to new hardware, you’ll also want to read this Hardware Independent Restore article in the Knowledge Base at the StorageCraft Support Center.
Simple Way to Avoid Data Loss
We’ve been saying it, and you’ve heard it time and again: Back it up! It’s the sure-fire way to avoid the nightmare of a fried hard disk. A recent article on Gizmodo.com ( The Five Stages of Data Loss Grief ) is a perfect reminder of the whole reason to back up your data — to avoid the disaster altogether. The article is pretty funny, taking you through the stages you go through, much the same way that therapy takes you through the stages of grieving the loss of a loved one. The problem here is that this is an issue that’s entirely avoidable. A simple backup plan will eliminate the need to go through any of these stages. Instead, you’ll experience something like this:
1. Oh, no! My hard drive crashed.
2. Boy am I glad I backed up my data. Now it will just take a few minutes to restore my system.
Now that wasn’t difficult at all, was it? The reality is that while technology is great, it’s also prone to failure. Hard drives die, so back them up.
If you don’t already have one, buy backup software (like ShadowProtect, of course) that you can automate. Install it and set up a schedule. How often should you back up your data? The answer lies in how often you’re making changes to your drive. For most of us, a few times a day is more than sufficient, especially if your backup is running in the background so you don’t notice any change in your efficiency. But if you’re a power user or writing the great American novel, you may want to schedule backups several times an hour. Save your backups to a removable hard drive and then set it up to e-mail you in the event your backup fails. That may be your first indication that your hard drive is dying.
Next, make sure you have a separate backup of your hard drive saved in a remote location; update your off-site backup periodically. You may feel secure taking your off-site drive to a friend’s house for safekeeping. But if you’re protecting secrets that could bring down nations, you may want to secure that backup in a location such as a safety deposit box. If your friend’s home burns down (or the bank floods), after empathizing with your friend, make a new backup.
These steps may take a little time to plan and accomplish, but in the long run, you’ll sleep better and be much happier when your drive fails. Think of all the time you’ll save then.
Server Phobia
The March 2010 edition of Channel Pro has a great story about how to sell small businesses on system security. The article focuses on business that don’t have servers, but still need data protection and security. One StorageCraft partner, Bill Hole of The Hole Group, discussed how he’s using StorageCraft ShadowProtect to backup his customers’ data locally and off-site. Even though he’s recommended the customer upgrade and move to a server environment, the customer is happy knowing the company data is still safe.
When we talked about their budget for an upgrade, they still refused a server,” says Hole “They asked what [they] would gain from a server. Instead, they bought a second TeraStation and are happy with their decision.
The article also gives tips and tricks for selling your services to companies that aren’t networked. You can view the entire digital version of Channel Pro online.
Reliable Recovery
StorageCraft is featured in the March 12 edition of Processor in an article titled Reliable Recovery. StorageCraft VP of Product Management Brandon Nordquist discusses the company’s growth, even in a difficult economy, as well as the need for quick and reliable disaster recovery.
StorageCraft intends to continue its program of product expansion in the year ahead. One area that Nordquist has identified as having growth potential is virtualization, a key area for many software developers. Another major effort will be to increase the speed of recovery in all of its ShadowProtect applications.
“When you’re really in a crunch—when servers are down or the CEO’s laptop is not working—that’s when you need to do a very fast restore,” he says, noting that the key difficulty IT administrators have is keeping up with the daily accumulation of work data that then has to be restored in the event of a failure.
Nordquist also discusses StorageCraft’s business model, product line and some future plans in the article.
Speed Up Your Exchange Recovery
This webinar occurred in the past. For more information visit the Exchange backup page on the StorageCraft web site.
Due to popular demand, we’re adding additional online training sessions to introduce StorageCraft ShadowProtect Granular Recovery for Exchange. Many of our reseller and solution provider partners were not able to attend our previous Webinars, so we’ve added three — one this week and two next week. Here’s the schedule for the training sessions:
Thursday, March 11th: 2:00 – 3:00 PM EST
Tuesday, March 16th: 2:00 – 3:00 PM EDT
Thursday, March 18th: 2:00 – 3:00 PM EDT
(The daylight time versus standard time designation should remind you that Daylight Saving Time begins Sunday. And it’s the dreaded “spring forward” when we lose an hour of sleep. Sorry.)
The training sessions will explain how ShadowProtect Granular Recovery for Exchange will help you recover lost mailboxes, e-mail messages and e-mail attachments, quickly and easily. It will also help you search for specific information in your Exchange environment (like e-mail messages containing certain words), migrate to a new Exchange server simply and easily or run reports on your Exchange environment. We’ve heard from some of our partners that software that does all that sounds “too good to be true” — but it really works. It will save you a lot of time and help you avoid many headaches.
2010 Storage Trend – Moving from Tape to Disk
Every year the storage analysts try to predict what the big trends will be for the coming year. They base their analysis on polling data and other research. Many of them are specific and others are more general. Enterprise Strategy Group’s 2010 list has some trends that are right up our alley. Here is one highlight:
#1. The shift from tape to disk: the modernization of backup continues.
From our perspective, that’s something everyone should have done years ago. But there are a lot of businesses that are still using tape for all of their backup. If you’ve already made the switch, you know that tape has problems from start to finish. Not only is it slow in recording the backup, it’s slow in restoring from the backup — that is, if you’re even able to use the backup. Disk is cheaper, faster and very reliable. Plus you can verify your disk-based backup quickly and easily with many MD5 verification tools. In the event of a disaster, recovering from a disk-based backup will not cause you hours and hours of frustration.
If you decide to keep your tape backups, we have a betamax, some 8-track tapes and a phone answering machine we’d like to sell you, too.
Other trends highlighted in the ESG report include the changing role of virtualization, cloud-based backup and the changing attitude toward backing up enterprise desktops and laptops. Check out the entire ESG list for yourself and see if you’ll be facing any of these issues for the year.