What I Inherited

My first job after I earned my degree in electronics was for A Pineywoods Home Health, Inc. On my first day, I was introduced to their “backup” system. In a nutshell, the way it worked is every day I would eject a tape from a server and put it in a bag and hand it to the office manager. She would then, in turn, give me another tape to insert into the machine. I did that religiously for about 5 months. Finally, I was caught up enough on emergencies to take a look at the backup tapes. After 5 or so months if something goes wrong they’re going to expect *ME* to fix it.

I gathered up the tapes and inserted the first one in the server and proceeded to take a look at what was on it. HORROR as I realized the tape was useless. The system was configured all wrong and there was nothing useful on the tape. If we’d have a server crash I would not have been able to get the company back up and running any time soon. I quickly reconfigured the system and implemented a schedule to verify the tapes.

What I learned

The result of that experience is now one of the things I include in all our managed services agreements is “Disaster Recovery Planning”. Basically, I work with my client to develop a system to get them back up and running in case their server crashes. I had the opportunity to see just how good my backup plan was last week during those storms that wreaked havoc in our area. In the mornings I look at all the networks I manage and look for issues. Sure enough, the storms caused quite a few issues for me to handle. One of my doctor’s offices was completely off-line.

That in and of itself isn’t much to be concerned with during or after a storm. It happens. I assumed I would just go to the office and check to make sure they had the Internet and if needed reboot the server. I showed up at the office before they opened and went to check everything. Sure enough, the server was failing to boot up. I tried a couple of times with no success.

Putting What I Learned Into Practice

Guess it’s time to see how good my backup is.

Here’s how I have that particular office set up:

1. The primary server is a VM (virtual machine) on a VMware ESXi server.
2. Anytime a major change to the operating system (OS) on the server occurs, a VM copy is made to a second physical host.
3. Daily the database is saved locally to a virtual machine file server on the second host.
4. Backed up the database is uploaded daily to a cloud server off-site.

I fired up the backup VM (virtual machine) on the other host. Then I copied the most current database from the backup file server. The process took less than 3 hours from the time I saw there was a problem with the network from my house. The doctor literally had no idea his server had crashed until I showed it to him unplugged on a counter.

http://partners.carbonite.com/pineywoodscomputer

How to prevent losing your memories from your computer.  Today someone brought in their external USB backup drive. “You’ve got to help me; ALL my pictures are on this drive. I plugged it into my computer today, and it said, ‘drive needs to be formatted.’ Everything’s GONE!“

Three times in the last week, I’ve worked on computers where the hard drives had crashed to the point of not being recoverable without considerable expense. Often crashed hard drives can be “recovered.” However, they have to be sent to specialists that physically take apart the drive platters and manually reconstruct your data. It is usually several hundred dollars to recover data from a crashed drive.

Another way you can lose all your pictures is through Malware, particularly one called CryptoLocker. Cryptolocker is a type of Malware called Ransomware. Ransomware encrypts documents and images on all the hard drives (including your external USB drive). Then tell you how much it’ll cost you to get the files unencrypted. I give a good description of CrytpoLocker in a previous blog post, Avoiding Malware.

I’m not too fond of when I have to tell someone their hard drive is crashed, and their pictures are lost. Every time I have to do it, I always ask, “Do you have a backup somewhere?”

Usually, the answer is no. Everyone is sad.

The technology exists to ensure you never lose your data permanently. This is how to prevent losing your memories from your computer. The solution is cloud storage backup. Cloud storage backup protects your data from loss either through a hard drive failure, theft, fire, or the newest threat to your pictures, Crytpolocker, and its many variants. What are all your photos worth to you?

I decided that I wanted to help as many people as possible keep their memories from ever being lost. Pineywoods computer has partnered with Carbonite. I looked at quite a few providers, and they all had their pros and cons. Carbonite won out for several reasons.

1. Automatic Backup. Photos, documents (tax returns, college essays, etc.), music, and emails are automatically saved to the cloud.
2. Set It & Forget It.
3. Carbonite works quietly in the background, continually adding new and changed files to the cloud – that means you’ll never have to add “backing up” to another to-do list again.
4. Safety & Security. Your files are encrypted and sent to our state-of-the-art offsite data centers that are monitored by guards 24/7 and secured with other stringent technical safeguards.
5. Easy File Recovery. With just a few clicks of your mouse, you can restore your precious family files and recover from unexpected computer glitches seamlessly.
6. Sync & Share. Available to all Carbonite customers, this free app syncs your work across all of your devices, allowing you to collaborate with family and colleagues on-the-go easily.

Pricing is extremely competitive. Unlimited storage for your home computer is less than $6/month. View all the Carbonite Plans HERE.