Done-For-You Services for Business
Canaries were once regularly used in coal mines as an early warning system. Toxic gases such as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide in the mine would kill the bird before it affected the miners. Because canaries tend to sing much of the time, they would stop singing prior to succumbing to the gas – therefore... Read More
From time to time I get asked if it’s a good idea to use a low-cost NAS device (Network Attached Storage) as primary disk storage. In most cases, I say NO. Let me explain. In an office environment, PC users frequently need to setup public folders so that information can be easily shared between workgroup... Read More
When you read the specifications on most modern disk drives, you’ll likely come across a statistic called MTBF. MTBF is the “Mean Time Between Failure” or the average time before the device is likely to fail. Disk drives usually carry an MTBF of over 1 million hours. Given that there are 8,760 hours per year,... Read More
Each month, Dr.Backup clients perform over 70,000 backup jobs resulting in millions of files being transferred onto our storage servers. Overall, the process runs very smoothly. However, not every scheduled backup progresses to a successful completion. Sometimes jobs don’t start. Other times, a file or folder will “error out” and fail to transfer. I estimate... Read More
Needless to say, Dr.Backup‘s back office computers perform nightly online backups of our business-critical data files. However, in addition to the off-site backups, we also depend on a local backup to periodically snap an image of our critical systems. One of our back office computers runs Microsoft Windows Server 2008. It’s a fairly new server... Read More
These days, more and more businesses run mission-critical applications which depend on complex database technology. Some examples include point-of-sale processing, patient electronic medical records (EMR), inventory control systems and financial accounting packages. If any of these applications fail, things get nasty quickly! To prevent permanent data lose and to minimize downtime, it is very important... Read More
Each day, 100’s of new viruses are “born” on the Internet. In most cases, these nasty pieces of malware are trapped by anti-virus software before they can infect your computer. But, sometimes viruses wind up on your disk – where they are seen as ordinary data files and are candidates for backup. If your online... Read More
I was recently asked what I thought was a fairly simple question: What file do I select to backup my Quickbooks company data? Being the smart person I am…I immediately fired back a short email saying “just backup the .QBW file”. Seemed like a simple enough answer. But then, I got to thinking that maybe... Read More
If I had a nickel for every time I heard a client say “why isn’t my backup working? – I didn’t do anything to my PC” … well, I’d have a lot of nickels! Did you know that on a regular basis, Microsoft Windows (the control program for your computer) automatically accesses the Internet and... Read More
While many vendors offer products which claim to automatically create nightly online backups, we feel very adamant that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A SET-IT-AND-FORGET-IT ONLINE BACKUP APPLICATION. If your business depends on an online backup service for disaster protection – and isn’t that why you have it – your backups MUST be regularly... Read More