Twilight Highlight: Wake up and Smell the Data

Ever have data loss nightmares? I really think you ought to. Seriously. It could be great for your company, and would likely save you money. Nothing like a midnight panic attack to motivate a security upgrade!

Here’s the scene:  A nameless employee calls your direct line while you’re on vacation and reports that the file server is “on the fritz”. They are worried about data loss. Should they bring the storage drive over to the tech people while it’s “still alive”? Beads of sweat start to form on your neck, and it’s not from the beachy sunshine you had hoped to bask in, worry-free.

This has actually happened, not just during REM sleep but in the real business world. The idea was that we would move the client’s data to a stable location and back it up before the system tanked entirely.

The questions we needed to ask ranged from the obvious – “Where is your backup?” …To the frustrating: “What about the backup solutions I have been urging you to use for the past 5 years?”

I told the client to bring in the drive immediately.

A week passed.

Then a call came in to my home phone from my business partner. He needed me to get hold of the client right away. It was 8:00PM and their drive had “died completely”.

I phoned the client and got the lowdown: When I had told them to bring it in a week before, it had “magically started working again”. They had moved some of the most pressing files to another machine on the network and just figured that “it’s not going to die”. Trying to avoid any and all costs (as we are all guilty of), they had not yet woken up to reality.

When the machine actually did die (GOOD MORNING, SUNSHINE!), the person on-site panicked and, for whatever reason, ran the computer to the nearest office supply store, (specializing in staples),  where a tech “played with it for a couple of hours” and came to following diagnosis: “The hard drive is dead. We can send it to a lab for you. $500 to look at it, possibly $50K to recover.”

I got the drive into our office. Five hours later we had recovered all of the data for considerably less. Quite considerably less. Like, I-must-be-dreaming-less.

For tens of dollars a month, nearly any small business can have cloud-synced, real-time accessible network storage and backup.

Or you can fly back from your weekend oasis and pay $50,000 for a kinda-sorta fix.

Black Hole Backup: Defend Yourself Against Data Loss of Extreme Proportions

You have a computer. You back up your personal data. You also have a business, and that data had better be backed up. Losing photos from Aunt Ginny’s retirement party is one thing. Losing your client database?…Oh the horror.

If you do have a backup solution for your business, do you know what it really means for you? How long will it take to recover from a server crash? Accidental deletion of finance records? Your facilities vanish into a wormhole? Okay, maybe not that last one, but even the seemingly smallest of losses can have dramatic – and immediate – effects on the functioning of your company. And unfortunately, over a third of data loss is caused by human error or negligence- that mean’s even the best hardware and software configurations are susceptible to security risks.

I’ve found that more often than not, small business owners are surprised to realize they don’t have the answers to these questions – and probably haven’t thought to ask them in the first place.

Where is your backup? What format is it stored in? How long will it take to recover and, perhaps most importantly, what exactly is recoverable? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, good IT service providers can help you, and find solutions where they are needed.

So find out, before that wormhole creeps up on ya’.

Business Bandwidth Blues

You get back from your lunch hour only to find that your company e-mail won’t load and that video-conference call you had planned is streaming at an unbearably choppy rate. What gives?

A slow internet connection at the office is a common problem for businesses faced with multiple users and limited bandwidth. Most employees aren’t even aware of how much bandwidth they are hogging, and often enough only one or two tech-savvy colleagues are able to guess what the problem could be when the system comes to a near-halt.

This is especially relevant for companies that had their internet service set up long ago when their 1.5x 512k connection was enough. Since then, they have probably grown, and with increasing size and complexity, added remote backup or FTP hosting. Today’s web services evolve fast, and keeping up with the need for speed – and more users – can be a real challenge.

Problems multiply when users abuse their bandwidth and perform unnecessary (and often unproductive) tasks on work computers. In one memorable instance I arrived on site for a security audit to find not one but two employees running bit torrent, through the company connection, to download…Well, never mind what they were downloading, but it was eating up bandwidth quite ravenously.

Though our country is still far behind such industrial powerhouses as Lithuania, Sweden, South Korea and Romania, bandwidth is relatively cheap and available now.  This does not necessarily mean upgrading is your solution- instead, find out what you have and how you use it. It may be time for a change….And perhaps some house rules for appropriate internet use. 

Dear Verizon: Can you hear me now?

I’m sure that the first thing you think about upon starting your weekend is how you just can’t wait to configure your router.

Okay, maybe not, but listen up anyway.

Supposedly in an effort to make your life easier, at least one major U.S.internet service provider has recently made a habit of provisioning their residential customers with “all in one” devices rather than standard cable/DSL modems. Basically, the device that connects your home to the outside world comes with a wireless router built into it. At first glance this looks like a great idea – one box takes care of your wireless and wired routing, in addition to handling connections to the cloud. At second and third glance it often holds true.

So why my slightly testy tone? Because if you have any needs to forward ports, extend wireless capabilities, or simply want to install your own router, these devices, coupled with a certain approach to customer service, make the job unnecessarily difficult.

We are frequently contacted by folks who inform us that Verizon has told them they need to pay for business class service if they want to set up their own router.

The first time this happened, I arrived on site and thought, “Why not just bridge the devices?”  Herein lies the problem, and my chief gripe: When I logged in to the Ubee brand device to make the changes, I was informed that I needed “administrative privileges” to make the change. It took no less than four tiers of support to get someone who “had authorization” to bridge the modem… the first two tiers had no idea what I was talking about.

I have since discovered that Verizon, at least, has loosened up and now allows trained first line techs to bridge modems for folks who want to use their own routers. This is good policy and they should be commended for it. Congratulations.

What I suggest to folks is this: Consider asking your ISP for an installation that allows you to upgrade and modify your router without having to call and ask for permission.

~Daniel Straw, CEO of Technology Rentals of America

The Cold Compress – Data Storage Malpractice Alert!

One of the most common ailments we see in our repair shop on older machines is the compressed system drive, and it hurts.

Here’s how it works:

Windows has a built-in feature that allows the compression of data on a drive, along with a warning system that alerts you when a drive is reaching its data-storage limits. Sounds good, right?

Many older consumer desktops and laptops were built with what we now think of as “low capacity drives” – 80GB or so. These were adequate for simpler tasks of the past; it was not as easy back then to amass hundreds of photos of half your own face, taken with that iPhone thinga-ma-jig. Gradually, however, these systems begin to slow down and you start seeing warnings about disk space. The warnings become ever more insistent and even offer some guidance: “Click here to remove unwanted files…”

Becoming desperate, you inevitably end up at the properties sheet for the system drive, and the situation goes from bad to worse. In the General tab you see the Holy Grail – the quick, easy fix to all that ails you is just a tick-box away in plain sight, next to the phrase “compress this drive to save disk space”.

Why would you NOT tick that box? Isn’t this just what your computer has been nagging you specifically to do for days? Months? (Hopefully not) years? “FREE UP DISK SPACE,” it begs.

You tick the box, briefly wondering why that beautiful feature is not enabled by default, and hit apply.

Going back to work, the computer has some newly freed space but is still REALLY slow. So what happened?

One of the reasons that this feature is not enabled by default is that when you compress files on a drive, you need to decompress them in order to use them. You also need to recompress as you write them back to the drive. When this is done on a system drive, it ensures that all of those extra steps (which require RAM and disk space) must be taken for every single action.

In extreme cases, the problem is even larger. In order to get things working again, the drive must be decompressed. If the user has continued after the compression to write data (painfully slowly) to the drive, when they try to decompress, they are faced with an error message to the effect that there is not enough free space to do so. Failure…at a glacial pace.

One solution of course, is to move the data to a larger drive and decompress there. There are many others. All of them amount to a great deal of needlessly wasted time. The best solution is always planning ahead.  Never compress your system drive.

Instead? Backup. Backup? Backup!!!

Desktop Dominion

I hear a great deal of talk these days about the death knell for desktop computers, as if they are a species no longer fit for today’s über-fast, super-mobile world.  The argument usually goes that with the advent of tablet computers, smart phones and cheap, powerful laptop computers, a computer that requires a desk is simply an unnecessary expense.

While this reasoning is sound in some instances, in practical application a powerful desktop is a more valuable tool, even as mobile devices become smarter and better connected. The best way to illustrate my point is to tell you how I use my own desktop as a sort of “personal area network server”.

I have a very powerful desktop computer in my office. Back in the pre-touchscreen era, I would often drive to my shop to perform even simple tasks, rather than labor away in my rural home on a slower laptop with low bandwidth.

Now I have a smart phone. I also have a powerful, lighter weight laptop and a superlight net book. If I were so inclined, I could have a tablet too, but that’s another post.

I could be doing the gadget-dance so popular among us humans- set up my smart phone to download my mail, edit documents on my laptop and save the files to cloud storage or a network drive, and use the net book for quick internet access. But despite being office-bound, my super-powerful desktop so clearly dominates these in terms of productivity that I rely on it for everything, wherever I am.

Thanks to evolution, almost any desktop computer with a reasonably fast internet connection can be accessed via one remote desktop protocol or another. Whether you use the built-in (to Windows) RDP client or a paid-for third party client like Logmein, is almost irrelevant. The point is that you can work at that one computer from wherever you are. This centralizes security, storage, communication and scheduling into one place.

Your desktop doesn’t have to be a dinosaur- especially with current customizable options; it can deliver enormous performance at drastically lower costs than some of the smaller technobeasts out there. Now who’s king of the jungle?

 

~Daniel Straw, IT Specialist and CEO at Technology Rentals of America

Reasons We’re In “The Future”: Remote Access Desktop

IT solutions master Daniel Straw spills the beans on his super-efficiency…

Self-hack? No, just secure access to your remote desktop.

If you’ve ever had a support technician log in to your computer, or worked in an office that utilized multiple connected desktops, then you’re probably familiar with the remote desktop. This convenient virtual connection, once only available in the pages and film reels of science fiction, can now help you and your business run more effectively, whether its intergalactic conferences or pulling up that presentation you left on the kitchen table.

Have you ever thought to yourself, “It would be awfully convenient to access my own home computer from work”?…Or from Vinny’s pizzeria?…The airport?…Or, my favorite, from your car?

As a Class-A IT Road Warrior, I not only have done these things, but need to on an almost daily basis. I even access my PCs from my laptop while moving down the highway at 65mph. (While someone else is driving, of course).

Now, all of this is probably no surprise to most of you, but I am certain that there are those among you who were unaware that most computers, regardless of operating system or hardware, contain everything you need to set up remote desktop access out of the box.

Any competent technician can set up remote access through a standard home router in minutes. Most folks I have demonstrated the process to are surprised at how simple it is…no software or hardware purchases required.

Wanna learn how?

Daniel Straw, IT Business Services

Get help with remote access and more at Technology Rentals of America!

Where Have All the E-Mail’s Gone?

Find out from our  IT service guru, Daniel Straw:

Where are your email messages and contacts stored?

At home it’s easy enough- through your e-mail server or in an address book file on your personal use computer. And since you are an “interwebs”-savvy, chronically careful and über-efficient home user, you always back up your data….right?

When it comes to ensuring that your business runs smoothly, secure, accessible data storage is a priority that goes beyond archiving grandma’s casserole recipes and pun-filled forwards from your Uncle Frankie. The constant flow of exchanges that come with even the smallest of successful businesses are valuable records, but also contain the material you need for day-to-day operation. It’s in your best interest to utilize an IT support system that can get you the right info at the right time.

Many of our small business clients are customers because they do not, for a variety of reasons, have their own in-house IT support.  T.R.A. has clients whose initial need was immediate recovery of exactly these resources that are used daily- e-mail exchanges, contact data and records of correspondence. In some of those cases, we have been able to help rapidly and get everyone back on track. In others, time consuming research (read:  pricey!$!) was necessary just to scope out the problem! This is what happens when the original  electronic messaging system is out-of-date, improperly run and neglected or, as is so often the case, was set up by someone who is no longer with the company.

Where is the mailstore? I have a host? Local or exchange?  The basics are essential. Would you go to the mechanic without knowing the year and make of your car? The best defense against e-mail amnesia and its costly cures is, of course, good record keeping. If you’ve contracted with a support company like T.R.A., DEMAND detailed documentation of how your service is configured, if it isn’t already provided for you. Keep it handy. Keep it safe. It will save you time and money when it’s time to problem-solve.

Daniel Straw, Business IT Services

Find out more about Dan’s service’s at Technology Rentals of America.