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August 30, 2010

Rollback Rx – a Disaster Recovery Solution

Filed under: Windows Disaster Recovery — wayne @ 2:45 am

Rollback Rx system restore software helps in disaster recovery. If you work with computers, you have to be prepared with a disaster recovery solution. What is disaster recovery? It is the ability to speedily recover from the loss of data. It restores system settings so that your system is ready to use as quickly as possible, retrieving data and making it accessible to you. Rollback Rx does this in minutes, whereas if one were to use manual recovery methods, there’s no guarantee that data will be intact, not to mention the hours or days that it might take to repair computers.
In spite of advances in rollback technology , data continues to be lost through user errors and unsuccessful software installs. Updates create a problem necessitating disaster recovery. Windows system restore only restores computer settings but does not recover data. In such a situation, the ideal system restore software is Rollback Rx, which practically helps a business to keep running.

Rollback Rx Retrieves Critical Data
In business organizations, if there has been data loss, their success in maintaining continuity of work depends more on their ability to retrieve their data as fast as possible, rather than getting the hardware up and running. The important information in most organizations resides in electronic form inside a computer making it critical to have access to it at all times. Rollback Rx makes sure that you can recover your data right up to the moment your pc crashed ensuring that you have your data back so that you are not stuck without vital information while making business decisions.
Rollback Rx system restore software keeps track of data and system files as they keep altering. Lets say you are working on a document and happen to delete a part of it, then save it after you change it. Suddenly you realize that you did not want to delete that information. Maybe it runs to several pages and will take hours to create again. With Rollback Rx software, you can revert right back to the earlier version of the file with absolutely no data loss. You can restore computer settings, registry settings, and rollback to any earlier moment in time. Suppose your system is affected by malware or unsolicited software downloads and installations, you can use Rollback Rx to fix computer problems by restoring your system back to an operational point.
RollBack Rx protects you from day zero attacks by taking system snapshots based on a set schedule for your system, restoring your crashed system without data loss in just the time it takes to reboot your system.

Jacob Henderson
http://www.articlesbase.com/security-articles/rollback-rx-a-disaster-recovery-solution-74407.html

IT Business Continuity: The Top Reasons For Email Outages

Filed under: "SAN Backup" — wayne @ 2:45 am

Email has become the most pervasive form of business communication, impacting every aspect of every organization: communications between management, employees, prospects, customers, vendors, suppliers, partners, investors, and analysts.

The average email user sends 34 emails and receives 99 emails every day, and overall email use is growing 53% per year. Despite large enterprise investments in replication, mirroring, and tape back up systems, email systems continue to fail. While it is widely known that natural and man-made disasters can lead to email outages, new data shows that email systems are more frequently brought down by technological failures.

MessageOne, a leading provider of email continuity solutions, commissioned this research report to understand the frequency, severity, and cause of email outages in North American corporations using Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes. This research shows that enterprise email systems are prone to a variety of potential breakdowns including SAN (Storage Area Network) failures, improper configuration, losses in network access, database corruption, and viruses. Data from the survey shows that in any given 12-month time period, there is a 75% likelihood of an unplanned email outage and a 14% likelihood of a planned email outage for any given company.

MessageOne recently surveyed its customers — hundreds of companies serving over 1,000,000 email users — on email outages during a recent 30 week period. This report analyzes the leading causes of failure with enterprise email systems.

Email Outage Frequency & Duration

Survey results show that in any given 12-month time period, there is a 75% likelihood of an unplanned email outage and a 14% likelihood of a planned email outage in any given company. The length of email outages in the companies surveyed ranged from a minimum of 2 minutes to a maximum of 120 hours with the average email outage being 32.1 hours long.

Responses on Email Outages:

• 29% of outages between 4 and 24 hours in duration
• 28% of outages between 1 and 4 hours
• 26% of outages lasted more than 48 hours
• 17% of outages were between 24 and 48 hours

Causes of Unplanned E-mail Outages

A large majority of email outages were caused by unplanned events, most of which were due to technological failures.

Reasons for Technological Failures:

• 35% were due to server hardware failures, averaging 18.1 hours in outage duration,
• 19% were due to connectivity losses, averaging 27.4 hours,
• 16% were due to SAN failures averaging 25.5 hours, and
• 16% were due to database corruption averaging 9.0 hours in duration.

The majority of these, specifically database corruption and SAN failures, are troubling because they are the most difficult to prevent. Even with expensive mirroring and replication backup solutions, data corruption and SAN failures are often propagated to the mirror or replicated backup server. These failures usually result in long outages as companies resort to incremental tape backups to locate the last backup before the corruption occurred.

Note: While natural disasters accounted for only 14% of unplanned email outages, the average downtime due to such disasters was over 60 hours, meaning these can lead to significant impact on businesses.

Conclusions: Despite Heavy Investment, Email Still Fails

Every day, more and more companies are concluding that email is a mission-critical application worthy of inclusion in a business continuity plan.

Email continuity plans need to be developed that take into account the shortcomings of tape backup and replication/mirroring systems. Solutions should then be deployed that limit dependency on these types of technology and can reduce downtime during any outage. You can learn more about email continuity, email management systems, IT disaster planning and recovery, and business continuity planning.

James Kerrigan
http://www.articlesbase.com/computers-articles/it-business-continuity-the-top-reasons-for-email-outages-110973.html

August 27, 2010

Backup Best Practices for the Small Business…

Filed under: Backup Best Practices — wayne @ 10:17 am

 Backup Best Practices for the Small Business must include being able to quickly restore failed systems. 

This problem completley disappears when you are running images – virtual copies – of your computer system!

This solves several poblems. Not only can you immedialy restart a failed image, your business continues to run.

The first step is very easy to accomplish: Download a free copy of Acronis 2011 and create an  image of your courrent computer system. Copies of this image should also be made for storing in a safe place some where else. In case you need to use them you also need ready access to them. 

At this point you have several options. I like the USB 3 type external drives for backup. If your system is less than 2 – 3  terabytes you can get two drives and make coomplete drive images every hour. Oh, whats that you say, ” Hey, Wayne I want to get something done besides backup!” Well, one simple way to get both is to wait for the business to close and run the backup image at night. Then run “incremental” change backups each hour – these are normally much quicker.  

The frequency of backup is of course completely up to you. It all goes back to the first post inis series… 


How Much data can you afford to lose?

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