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backups

Gone In Sixty Seconds: Protecting Your Laptop & Data

September was a whirlwind travel month for me, having been in both Charlotte, North Carolina and Chicago in the last three weeks of the month.The training is great, but as anyone who has traveled lately knows, the airports can become a real challenge.

I was waiting in the Charlotte airport for my return flight to Detroit, and watched an awful story unfold.

A passenger, who was obviously a business owner or executive was searching frantically for his laptop case. After about 20 minutes, airport police showed up and it turns out his laptop had been stolen.

Business owners as well as your average everyday computer users are turning to laptops more and more each and every day, due to their mobility and the ability to keep them in touch with the office no matter where they are.

A huge importance that many seem to forget is keeping their data safe, and doing regular backups. I would guess that every three in five users are not performing any type of backups. They run the huge risk of losing all their valuable data, programs, and even their entire computer as the gentleman in the airport did.

It is crucial to have a backup solution in place, especially for business owners who keep most of their work information on their laptop computer.

With today’s technology options, you can find a backup solution that will work for you, and there seems to be a price range for everybody.

Backups can be performed in several ways, from a manual backup to a CD or DVD, some form of removable media like a flash drive, or SD card, and there are even the higher end solutions like BDR and off site backups.

Typically a backup solution would come with a piece of software to control your backups. Things such as what you’re backing up, how often your backing up, and where you want the backups to go.

The beauty of using software is it almost completely automates the process, and becomes something you don’t have to worry about any longer, knowing that if your computer is stolen, or your hard drive suddenly crashes out, you have a good copy of your data, and you can be back up and running in no time at all.

My favorite solution is the offsite backup, which can be offered thanks to the Internet. With an offsite backup system, data that is on your laptop, workstation, or server(s) can be sent out across the Internet (typically encrypted) to an offsite location.

So for example, you could be working at your company, and having all your daily additions to a highly secure data center out in the cloud. This would protect your information from a disaster such as a building burning down, or a fatal hardware crash.

If that sounds like overkill for your situation, an easier solution can be used, such as backing up once a week to a flash drive.

All Windows based systems have a utility built in called Backup and Restore. This utility will allow users to backup just their  personal data, such as pictures, documents, emails, etc. or even take it a step further and back up the entire computer’s  configuration, including the data.

Windows Complete PC Backup and Restore is most useful for disaster recovery when your PC malfunctions.

This feature helps you create complete PC backups, and then in the event of a serious system issue or data loss, Windows Complete PC Backup and Restore can restore your entire PC environment, including the operating system, installed programs, user settings, and data files.

If you do not have currently have a backup solution implemented, please contact our technical support team. We can work with you to set up backups to a flash drive or CD.

We also have a great offsite solution for $39.99 per month that will keep all of your data safe in the event of a failure. It works transparently in the background, encrypting and forwarding your data to our data center, where’s it is stored and updated as needed.

The best thing about this type of solution is that it doesn’t require you to do anything – the backups occur automatically, and we’re notified if there is ever a problem where your backup didn’t complete properly.

How Does Offsite Backup Work?

As your storage needs increase, you’re faced with the challenge of managing and optimizing data protection processes. You may find that your data no longer fits on just one tape. On top of all of that, employees often forget to put in a new backup tape each day. That’s when having a fully automated and backup solution is essential for your business.

This is where offsite backup comes in. Secure and reliable data protection is vital to your disaster recovery plan.

Whether you’re backing up 5 GB or 500GB of data, offsite backup solutions allow you to maintain a current offsite backup at a secure remote facility.

A special software agent is loaded on your server, which compresses and encrypts your data before sending it via the Internet to the offsite backup storage facility.

Data is backed up while your servers are up and running. This reduces costs associated with server or application downtime.

In addition, application special software agents allow for real-time backup of Exchange, SQL, and other databases.

Your data is secure from the moment it’s transferred to the storage vault, and it remains encrypted until it’s restored on the client computer. Only those with a vault password can access the backup data.

Is There A New Computer In Your Future? Here’s A Tip To Help You Transfer Your Important Information!

It eventually has to happen, we need a new computer. You can buy one from the “BIG BOX” stores, or order online or worse yet buy one from “Freddie” on the corner, but the time will come that you need a new computer.

The technology advances so fast it is hard to grasp what you need, what the kids need, and what should you buy that will give you the most bang for your buck.

A bigger concern is: “What will you lose?” When you upgrade your computer, it’s important to preserve the “my documents” and “my photos” folders.

How can you transfer them to your new computer and not lose them?

If you are running Microsoft Windows XP, you are in luck. Not only does Windows provide you with a file transfer wizard, they have a feature called profiles.

Each person who has logged in to a Windows computer had created a profile that has all of  their favorites, documents, music, and photos stored in an easy to transfer directory structure.

The secret is in knowing how to move them to the new computer.  It is very easy. I mentioned thumb drives and external storage in my last article.  Using your external storage, it’s relatively simple to transfer things over. Since each person who uses the computer has their own profile, all of their information is stored separately – all you need to do is find your profile, which is under your user name and then copy the folder which is named after your login name.

For example, if I created a user called “BigBob” then a profile folder called BigBob would also be created. This folder will contain all of my documents, Internet favorites and music if I have saved them to the default location.

Once you find the user’s profile folder, you’d just copy the folder to your external storage or thumb drive. Then, on your new computer, you’d copy the folder back to the same place. I know this gets confusing, but it isn’t that difficult.

Microsoft has developed a way to keep all of your information stored in one central location, and keep each user’s information separate from each other.

This makes it so easy to do the transfer to a new computer.  But to play it safe! If you have very important information, or you haven’t made a recent backup, you may want to use Tech Experts to transfer your data, photos and music to you new system.

We do it every day, and we realize the importance of your data. Give us a call at (734) 457-5000, or e-mail support@mytechexperts.com.

Conficker And Other IT Security Issues Got You Worried? Here Are Some Tips To Keep You Out of Trouble!

If you watch television or read the news on the web, you no doubt heard about the April fool’s virus, also known as the conficker worm. I have been asked by numerous people “What about Conficker?” This worm is designed to have all the compromised computers “phone home” at a certain time and launch a denial of service, or DoS, attack on an unsuspecting website.

A DoS attack is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. It generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely.

One common method of attack involves saturating the target machine with external communications requests, so that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. That was the goal of the Conficker worm – to make sites unavailable on the Internet.

So, what should you do to prevent this from happening to you? Here are a few simple rules to follow to protect your system from these worms.

Disable the autorun feature
Although this is a nice feature to have cds auto start, this risk is not worth the few extra seconds it takes to launch a cd on your own.

Update your protection
Do not just rely on the automatic update features of your virus and malware protection software. It is smart to visit these update centers and make sure you have the latest software, particularly when you’re doing a lot of sensitive work on your computer.

Check your Windows updates
It should go without saying that in addition to your virus definitions, you should regularly check windows updates and do not rely on the automatic update feature. In the case of the Conficker C worm, Microsoft has had this patch available since October of last year. Still, as you heard on the news, thousands of computers still got infected.

Get a second opinion
Have a trained, certified technician review your computer to determine if you have the latest updates and security patches in place, along with removing any malware infections you might already have.

Back up your data
I can’t stress enough the importance of maintaining a backup schedule. All your important data needs to be protected. And, you should always take a copy of this critical data off site, so that if a natural disaster strikes, you have an undamaged copy of your data available.

You never know when tragedy will strike, or some brand new virus or worm will attack your system before anti-virus software can be updated.

Contact Tech Experts and we can help you select the perfect backup solution for your office.

We’ve seen our fair share of worms and viruses come and go, and have an arsenal of tools and years of experience to keep your systems in top condition.

If you currently have a server and you have not been taking advantage of the Tech Experts server monitoring and maintenance plans, I would urge you to contact us as soon as possible to discuss the various options for your firm.

Technicians are always available to review your current network configuration and give you expert advice on security.

If you perform these few simple things I’ve listed above, you will be protected from the vast majority of malware and worms that are currently circling the Internet. With diligence in the future, you will be protected from most of the variants of these worms as they are released.

USB Flash Drives Great For Backups At A Low Cost

A few issues back I discussed what random access memory (RAM) was, and how important it was to have as much memory as your computer can hold. This month I’d like to talk about memories. Or more to the point the storage and retrieval of memories.

I’ve experienced countless numbers of hard drive failures in computers that belong to our home user clients and as a result of this failure they lose all of their precious photo memories.

Once I tell them that I cannot rescue these photos, a lot of times they get that deer in the headlights look, and it is so sad. I got to thinking about this as just this past holiday season, my wife and I purchased a digital camera. Never having owned one before, I have been taking pictures like crazy and downloading them to my home PC.

In years past, it wasn’t an issue to back up your photographs. You used to take your pictures into the store and have them developed. It didn’t matter which type it was, slides or photos: Once you got them back developed, you could put them in an album and anything short of a major disaster those images will live on for generations. Your “backup” was the negatives that came back with your pictures.

Hard drive failure can lead to a loss of so many memories that many feel this would be a major disaster. We’ve touched on various backup systems for business users, but home users should be just as vigilant in the protection of what they consider to be their important data, their photo memories.

As technology has changed over the years, storage technology has evolved just as quickly. We used to backup onto floppy disks. Then came the writable CD player. And just a few years back came the development of an affordable DVD writer that can store much more data then a CD.

But the latest technology is the USB thumb or flash drive. This tiny portable electronic drive has no moving parts and is small enough to fit on your key chain.

And as companies refine their technology; these drives have become more and more affordable.

The ease of use is one of it’s best features, a truly plug and play device that works instantly on any computer with a current operating system such as Windows XP or Windows Vista. You can move the drive with true ease from computer to computer to copy those memories and have them stored away for future generations.

I’ve seen USB flash drives with 4GB of storage sell for as low as $25. This type of capacity will allow you to store numerous photos and can serve as an electronic photo album. The other nice thing about a USB drive for backup is that you can use them for more than just pictures – any important data you have on your computer can be backed up or copied.

If you’d like more information about how to use a USB drive to backup your memories (and important documents), just give us a call at (734) 457-5000.

Please, Back Up Your Data!

All too often, we see clients who rarely, if ever, back up their critical data. And in all the years we’ve been repairing computers, we’ve never seen one break at a convenenient time. More often than not, your hard drive will fail at precisely the time you can least-afford to lose your data.

If all you use your computer for is occasional email or web browsing, a hard drive failure may not be too critical. But we’ll often go into a new client’s office and find their critical files aren’t being backed up, either locally on workstations, or on their server.

Even worse are those network installs we’ve encountered that don’t even include backup devices.

A recent issue of PC Magazine had an article on the nuts and bolts of data backup. It contained a lot of the same concepts that we’ve been preaching for eons and the highlights are worth repeating here.

  • Identify what you absolutely can’t afford to lose – photographs, financial information, address book, downloaded music, etc. – and ensure that they get backed up regularly.
  • For local computer and workstations, backup to compact disks if at all possible. They’re cheap, fast, safe and easy. If you have more data than will fit on a CD, go to DVD (which holds about 6 times more than a CD).  • If your files won’t fit on a DVD… think about a more professional backup system such as a REV drive from Iomega. If you have that much data, it is worth the investment in a professional backup solution to protect it.
  • Determine your optimal backup schedule by asking yourself how much data would be a hardship to reproduce if it were lost. Those who can’t afford to lose even one day’s work should back up every day. If recreating a week’s worth is no problem, then a weekly backup may do the trick. Either way, take the time to do the backup – recreating the data will take you much longer!
  • Store one copy of your data off-site. If your home or office burns down, backup disks that are sitting next to the computer won’t help you much.
  • Collect the installation CDs for all of your programs and store them together. Make copies of those disks that are critical to your business and keep them off-site.
  • Don’t be too quick to trash or overwrite older backups. If you encounter file troubles (data corruption or virus infection, for example), the most recent backup of that file may have the same problem.
  • Multiple solutions, such as daily back-ups on CD or DVD and weekly backups on a REV drive or tape system, give you more effective recovery and better protection.
  • Most consumer programs won’t copy files that are in use. Be sure to close all files before you run a backup. This is particularly important to note on server-based systems: You must invest in an open-file backup option for your backup system.
  • Check backups often to make sure they’re current (open the disk and verify the date of a recently used file). All too often, we hear horror stories from people who were convinced that they were backing up properly, only to find that nothing was actually being written to the disk or tape.

Backing up your important files can be painless. The same cannot be said of losing them. Give us a call and we’ll show how to make it quick and easy.

Why You Need A File Server Right Now

If you’re the owner or manager of a small- or medium-sized business that still uses peer-to-peer networking, it’s time to consider upgrading your network by installing a dedicated business server.

Due to recent technology advances, particularly the availability of Microsoft Small Business Server and Windows Sharepoint Portal Services, the pros definitely outweigh the cons. In fact, the upgrade may result in some benefits you hadn’t counted on.

How do you know when it’s time to upgrade to a server-based network? Here’s a simple checklist you can use to assess your needs, followed by a more detailed discussion.

It might be time to upgrade if:

  • Your staff is moving to laptop PCs.
  • Your staff is specializing and you need to start to segregate data.
  • You want critical data backed up securely and automatically.
  • Your office needs to use collaboration software, such as shared calendars.
  • Your staff requires remote access to shared data
  • Moving to Laptops

One characteristic of a peer-to-peer network is that individual member PCs share resources, such as files, printers, and fax modems, with each other.

Unfortunately, several recent technology trends are making peer-to-peer networks difficult to use and manage.

For example, many of today’s knowledge workers are switching to highly mobile laptop computers which may or may not be in the office at any given time.

When a PC is disconnected from the network, its resources aren’t available other users in the office.

Data Segregation
One of the most compelling reasons to upgrade your basic network to a server-based configuration is data security.

Even small companies have a legal responsibility to protect payroll, human resources, and other sensitive information from misuse, but the file sharing schemes used in peer-to-peer networks don’t provide the high level of control offered by server operating systems.

Automatic, Secure Backups
Along with access, backup is also an important part of any data security scheme. Regular and dependable backups are difficult to manage when data is stored on multiple desktop PCs because even the most sophisticated backup software can’t back up a PC that’s been turned off.

Once you move your critical data to a file server, regular automated backups can be scheduled to take place during off hours. Since the office staff doesn’t typically have access to the server’s operating system, it’s unlikely that anything will “interfere” with backup, and even if the network is down, a file server can faithfully back itself up to tape as long as it has power.

Collaboration
Although shared calendars and other collaboration tools are available from a number of Internet-based sources (Yahoo, Google, and others), your data is much more secure when it’s stored on your own file server.

You’ll also find that the selection of privately hosted collaboration software is broader and the applications are more customizable than those apps available online.

Remote Access
The increased use of laptop computers mentioned above eventually results in the need for remote access to company data. While this can be accomplished with products such as Symantec’s pcAnywhere, Citrix’s GoToMyPC, and even Windows XP’s built-in Remote Desktop Connection, secure remote access is built into most file server operating systems and remote users are subject to the same access restrictions and privileges as locally connected users.

In the past, one of the main deterrents to server-based networking has been the complexity of server operating systems, but this is rapidly changing. Once installed and properly configured, Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 requires about the same day-to-day technical expertise as Windows XP or Windows Vista.

And later this year Microsoft will release a “server appliance” product called Windows Home Server (WHS) that will provide many file server features with almost no human interaction. In fact, the device won’t even require a keyboard, mouse, or monitor — just plug it in and you’ll have an instant file server!

Another traditional objection has been the cost of dedicated file servers, which often out-weighed the budget – and the benefits for many small offices. Fortunately, technology advances are making low-cost, easy-to-operate servers available to offices that wouldn’t have considered them just a few months ago. Server equipment from IBM and HP, combined with Microsoft’s Small Business Server software, is now more affordable than ever for small companies.

In summary, if you’re still using a basic peer to peer network, you’ve probably outgrown it! Consider adding a dedicated file server to your suite of office tools to improve data access, security, and usability.

Detect Hard Disk Failure Before It Happens

Roughly 60% of all disk drive failures are mechanical in nature – from spindle-bearing wear to read/write heads banging into delicate disk platters – and now technology built into the drives can report anticipated and specific failures to give you a chance to rectify the situation, hopefully before it is too late to retrieve your data.

In addition to monitoring a variety of parameters related to mechanical events (disk platter RPM, time to spin up, motor current, head seek failures, and sudden shock to the drive chassis), S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) can report read and write retry attempts necessary due to defective areas on the disk or head failure or drive temperature.

Many S.M.A.R.T.-enabled drives can also report how many times they have been turned on and off and the number of hours the drive has been on.

If S.M.A.R.T. is enabled in your system BIOS, the BIOS will check and report any early or permanent signs of disk failure. You can also monitor your drive’s condition with a S.M.A.R.T.-aware disk monitoring program.

To view all available S.M.A.R.T. information about your drive, try the free DiskCheck utility from http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm.

DiskCheck is a nonresident utility that will show you exact drive information and all of the supported S.M.A.R.T. statuses from your drive.

There’s also Ariolic Software’s ActiveSMART (http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/) resident monitoring tool, which provides a wealth of detail on drive status and notification of potential failures.

If you get a S.M.A.R.T. warning about a drive failing, back up your data immediately and replace the drive.

A failing disk drive is no fun. A failed disk drive is even less so. In working with our clients, we’ve encountered a lot of grieving “Have I lost all of my data?” looks from end users.

It is indeed a sad time. Many times, clients don’t “get religion” about data backup until something catastrophic like this occurs.

A plethora of disk drive repair and data recovery tools are available to help recover your data. But, the single most effective way to ensure you won’t lose your data in the event of a hardware problem is to make regular backups!

We’ve long since given up on the pedestrian Norton Utilities like Norton Disk Doctor because it does not do enough to spend the time running it, especially for those really cranky lost partitions, erratic mechanical problems inside the drive, and when S.M.A.R.T. says the drive is bad or going to be bad soon.

When it’s time to recover partitions and data we unlock our arsenal of serious disk recovery tools, which are:

  • Steve Gibson’s SpinRite 6.0 (www.spinrite.com) for finding and fixing or moving bad data blocks on FAT, NTFS, Linux, Novell, Macintosh, and even TiVo volumes.
  • Ontrack’s Easy Data Recovery (www.ontrack.com) for digging deep inside a drive and extracting recovered data to other media.
  • Symantec’s GHOST (www.symantec.com) to “peel” data off a bad drive to a disk image for replacement onto another drive, or to extract individual datafiles with Ghost Explorer.

And, if our internal data recovery efforts fail, we always have the option  of sending a drive out to a special data recovery service, such as Ontrack (www.ontrack.com) or Action Front (www.actionfront.com).

These services are typically very expensive – sometimes $1000 or more – but if it is the only option to recover your data, other than re-keying everything, it may well be worth the cost.

Just remember – regular, monitored backups are your best defense against hardware failure and data loss.

Sleep Easier With Automatic Off Site Backup Services From Tech Experts!

Off-site backup service from Tech Experts eliminates the risk of fire, flood, theft, hard drive failure, or even human error! Your precious data is automatically and securely sent across the Internet to Tech Experts’ backup server.

Your files remain on our server, for easy, instant retrieval. In fact, you can get any file as it existed in the past 30 days within five minutes.

Try that with a tape drive!

The best part is you don’t have to do anything. It happens automatically in the middle of the night.

No swapping tapes, no remembering to hook up the backup drive. Even on holidays!

And it’s secure enough for health care/HIPAA companies, law firms, and other sensitive data. Backup Service starts at only $59.95 per month!

Call us today for more information.

Sleep Easier With Automatic Off Site Backup Services From Tech Experts

Off-site backup service from Tech Experts eliminates the risk of fire, flood, theft, hard drive failure, or even human error! Your precious data is automatically and securely sent across the Internet to Tech Experts’ backup server.

Your files remain on our server, for easy, instant retrieval. In fact, you can get any file as it existed in the past 30 days within five minutes.

Try that with a tape drive!

The best part is you don’t have to do anything. It happens automatically in the middle of the night.

No swapping tapes, no remembering to hook up the backup drive. Even on holidays!

And it’s secure enough for health care/HIPAA companies, law firms, and other sensitive data. Backup Service starts at only $59.95 per month!

Call us today for more information.