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Backup. Archiving. Retrieval. Say these words and watch the
eyes of your audience glaze over as if the subjects were trans
lunar orbital velocity and advanced calculus. Do you feel the
same?
Only in an emergency does anyone care about the safety of his
or her data, and that’s the key. Data backup is an impersonal
idea. It quickly becomes personal when payroll comes around
and Joe in Accounting finds his QuickBooks or Peachtree files
have gone south. A hard drive failure leaves Mary’s team
without a vital mail merge database, and meanwhile, in the
front office, Chris has accidentally saved an old contract
over the new one he has been working on for two weeks. These
glitches and flubs might be amusing, if they were not costing
you money.
Virus damage, power outages, and accidental deletions: all
take their toll. And when it is your monthly budget that
dissolves into a jumble of irreconcilable bits and bytes, a
reliable backup suddenly seems a treasure worth having.
Yet even companies that have invested in expensive tape backup
can find these older systems slow to use and cumbersome for
recovery. Tapes are often better at recovering from major
system failures, or catastrophes such as fire, than rescuing a
secretary’s missing Word template. It can be a nightmare to
find out that, “Yes, that file is backed up, but we cannot
afford the time to set up a restore just for you.”
Disk-to-Disk, a Personal Approach Maintaining
tape backups can involve such tasks as identifying and
retrieving tape volumes, monitoring tape ID codes, loading and
unloading tapes, and inventory management. When restoring lost
data, it takes time to track things down and set up a
recovery. It’s in your best interest to make the process as
fast and painless as possible, even to the point of empowering
employees with their own, personal, disk-to-disk backups.
Affordable disk-to-disk storage is here, with excellent
solutions for large and small businesses alike. The concept is
simple: additional hard drives that maintain copies of your
data, leaving it as accessible as it was on your primary
drive. Ease of backup, ease of recovery, and complete
usability by even novice PC users are the hallmarks of this
technology. Iomega®
Solutions Accidentally saved over an
important file? Retrieving the backup copy can be as easy as a
single drag and drop with Iomega’s portable hard drive
solutions. Iomega, makers of the famous Zip drive, now offer a
series of USB 2.0 and FireWire portable hard drives, with
storage capacities ranging from 20 to 120 gigabytes. For the
protection offered, the prices are unbeatable, starting as low
as $200. Invest in Iomega’s automatic backup software ($40),
and Iomega backs up your important files automatically; it can
even be set to back up every time you save a file. Scheduled
backups, multiple backups to different locations, and the
ability to select single critical files and filter out others
are all standard.
Easy to install, Iomega portable hard drives represent the
perfect solution for small companies running only a few
computers, with a peer-to-peer network, or in need of
protecting a single, mission critical machine.
And Disaster Recovery Too As quick and user
friendly as they are, Iomega portable hard drives are the one
backup system likely to “get used” on a regular basis, to
recover from the glitches and flubs of everyday computing.
Even so, they are no slouches when it comes to full-fledged
disaster recovery.
By combining forces with Symantec’s Norton™ Ghost 2003, Iomega
drives can write and restore an image of your system and
files, even your entire hard drive, directly and
automatically. In the event of a major failure, getting back
to work on a new machine is only a few mouse clicks away.
Network administrators admire the capabilities of Norton™
Ghost too, knowing it can clone, deploy, configure, back up,
restore, and distribute software specific images to network
and mobile PC’s alike. Network Attached
Storage For larger companies, the solution of
choice is an Iomega®
NAS (Network Attached Storage) server. With capacities as high
as 720 gigabytes, NAS servers add high-volume,
high-availability storage within existing network
infrastructures. Using RAID (Redundant Array of Independent
Disks) technology, these systems are fast and capable when it
comes to protecting your entire network of information.
Gigabytes of data can be recovered in minutes. As the name
suggests, multiple drives are used in various backup schemes,
safeguarding your data so thoroughly that even a failure on
one or more of the NAS system’s own drives cannot destroy your
company’s information.
Are Tape Backups Obsolete?
According to Freeman Reports,
tape drive sales continue rise at about 4% per year. Only the
purpose is changing. As companies accumulate more and more
information, a need has developed to stockpile huge amounts of
dormant, or inactive data. Active data is defined as the
frequently used, business critical information we work with
every day. Inactive data represents old records, such as
billing and customer service information from years past.
These records may be valuable for historical or research
projects, but are rarely accessed. Relying on tape for these
purposes keeps disk storage and disk backup systems free for
swift access to current projects. Use
Shiloh To Find The Right Backup Solution With
over thirty years experience, Shiloh is the place to turn to
find the backup strategy that’s right for you. Shiloh services
over 1000 corporate customers and maintains systems as small
as two machines to fifty and more networked PCs. We understand
budgets and work to find affordable solutions that offer all
the protection you need. Shiloh has the experience to not only
recommend the right equipment, but to establish solid backup
protocols, like offsite storage of mission critical data,
ensuring that your business will run smoothly, in spite of the
obstacles. Give Shiloh a call today.
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