Whatever problem I have with technology, they always seem to offer me a few solutions to choose from. They are not only there to help me through problems, they will also educate me on what happened and how they fixed it.

Jody, Wes, and Richard are a great team and I trust them completely with my all my IT stuff.

Blair Valk

Colin Sanburg
Owner/CEO

Monday night, an 8″ water main burst in downtown Dallas, flooding the Dallas County Records Building. The basement of the Records building just happens to be where the county’s critical servers are housed – now under 6 feet of water. On Tuesday, county operations were reduced to old fashioned pencil and paper – including the court system and the jails. Needless to say, things have ground to a halt without an effective disaster recovery plan in place. One attorney, frustrated by the mess in the courts summed it up the best:  “We’re at a standstill. Things are happening, they’re just happening at a snail’s pace.”

But, this is government – these things are almost expected, right? There is already plenty of finger pointing going on, and the budget excuses are flying. No surprise. But, before we get too carried away in blaming Dallas County for their ineptitude, let’s look in the mirror. How would my business fare faced with a similar crisis?

It’s rarely a burst pipe.

Let’s call it really bad luck that a water main burst outside of the building and caused this catastrophe. That will probably never happen again in 100 years. Hopefully another tornado won’t hit downtown Ft. Worth again either. It may seem like a lot of fuss to implement disaster recovery plans  just in case one of these oddball events strike your business. But, it’s not these big events that keep me up at night – it’s the ordinary stuff. Stuff like spilled Cokes, power surges, accidental kicking, tripping over cables, and accidental bumping by the janitorial staff. We get to visit a lot of small businesses, and we’ve seen a lot of “server rooms”, or lack thereof. An astounding number of critical business systems are placed on top of filing cabinets, spare desks, or on the floor in plain sign in the office. It’s surprising how often the “server” is pulling double-duty as the receptionists workstation. In the event of a break-in, a thief will quickly grab the most important looking stuff under the assumption it is worth more. Worse still, imagine a disgruntled employee with easy access to your critical systems.

Check those tapes.

Dallas County is confident that no data has been lost due to their off-site backups. While I applaud the implementation of their off-site backup system, it will not surprise me at all to start hearing about faulty backups in the news next. This is especially true if they are still backing up to tape. Tape backups are notoriously fraught with complication during most restore attempts – if the tapes are still in good enough physical condition. We visit a lot of small business offices that have been dutifully changing tapes and taking them home at night only to find out they are blank when they really need them. Regardless of the method, an effective backup needs to be regularly verified.

Is your backup enough?

A good, verified backup, stored in an off-site location will likely protect you from data loss in almost every situation. But is protection from data loss enough? Off-site backups are good, but often times the data restoration times are measured in days, not hours. This also assumes that good hardware exists to restore to. The real question is how quickly your company can resume full operation. The Dallas County courts and criminal justice systems ground to a snail’s pace without their systems.  Oh well, so an already full court docket gets pushed for a few days – big deal. It’s a bigger deal if your call center is reduced to taking orders on legal pads. It’s a very big deal if your e-commerce website is down. Preventing data loss is important. Preventing downtime is more important.

Get Prepared

As small businesses, it’s tough to justify elaborate disaster recovery plans for somewhat unlikely scenarios. I understand. There’s a reason the receptionist is using the “server” to browse Facebook – it’s all you have. I get it. Here are some easy things you can do to be more prepared:

• Get your critical systems organized and secure. Don’t picture elaborate server rooms with special server racks. Often times this can effectively be done in a spare closet with some shelving from Home Depot. Make sure the door locks and the airflow is sufficient and you’ve got yourself an entrepreneur’s server room.
• Implement an effective tapeless, off-site backup system. Managed off-site backup has become extremely cost-effective and will make sure that your data is safe and sound no matter what happens to your building.
• Choose a backup solution that can use virtualization. Many tapeless backup methods will allow a backup image of your server to be restored as a virtual machine on alternative hardware. While this is not the ideal long-term solution, it will keep you productive while your new servers are being restored.
• Go over your security protocols with your IT professional. Who has access to your critical systems both in the office and remotely? When is the last time passwords were changed?
• Don’t forget your laptops. How much critical information is stored on the business owner’s laptop?

Common sense is still the best weapon in preparing against disasters. These simple tips will help get you thinking in the right direction. Of course, more elaborate and complete disaster recovery solutions are available. If your company can justify the expense, I recommend doing so. Can your business afford not to?

For the full story on the burst pipe, check out the Dallas Morning News.

Give Crashed Hard Drives a Break

Over the last few months, DriveSavers engineers have a noticed a steady increase in the number of hard drives received at our facility that have severe media damage, making them unrecoverable. While it is difficult to pinpoint the cause of media damage, experience tells us recovery attempts on these drives may have been made using utility software, or perhaps the drive was left running and a minor head slap became major media damage.

In many cases, the customer’s data had been scraped from the hard drive’s platters, turning it into magnetic dust. While it’s a fact that DriveSavers has the highest data recovery success rate, even we have our limits!

As we are fond of saying, “The first data recovery attempt is the best.” Sometimes, it’s the only chance we get if the drive develops media damage during the data recovery process. To minimize the risk of making a bad situation worse, if your customer’s data is valuable or irreplaceable, do not run software utilities.

If for some reason you must attempt a data recovery, follow these important guidelines to avoid permanent data loss:

• If a hard drive makes any repetitive clicking or grinding, do not attempt a data recovery. The drive may have media damage. Operating the drive in this state will make the situation worse.
• If you connect the hard drive to a computer and it is not recognized in the setup, stop the process. The drive may have a damaged circuit board and should not be swapped with an identical model, as it could remove the bad sector table.
• Avoid utility software that makes changes to the drive’s firmware or bad sector table. This can permanently corrupt the data.
• Avoid home remedies such as placing a hard drive in a freezer. This will create condensation buildup inside the drive mechanism creating further problems.

© 2010 DriveSavers Data Recovery Inc.

IT Support Dallas

Tech Central’s newest client is a manufacturer of equipment for the airline industry. They are a small business that is on a fast track for growth, and have recently upgraded their web-based ordering tools for inbound orders. Reliability and availability of their servers is now more critical than ever to maintaining their high standards of customer service.

Shortly after deploying our 24/7 Network Monitoring tools, Tech Central detected a critical issue: 2 failing hard drives on their main server. Luckily, they were detected before the hard drives were is a state of complete failure. Tech Central’s Managed Backup service was already deployed, so redundant local and offsite backups of the data were already in place – just in case.

New hard drives were rushed in and installed, and a data disaster was averted. Talk about making a great first impression! To make it even better, all work was covered under the client’s flat-rate service plan.

The owner of the company had this to say:

IT Support Dallas

I hate buying toner. Nothing can ruin my day faster than running out of toner. The whole experience seems like such a racket. My color laser printer refuses to print if even 1 of the 4 toner cartridges is low, forcing me to buy a replacement. When I remove the low cartridge, there appears to be plenty of toner left in there to me. The high cost of toner has led me to try out bargain, remanufactured toner cartridges, which brought mixed success.

I decided to search the internet to find out if bargain toner is really a better deal. The results surprised me.

A 2007 independent study, performed by QualityLogic Inc. and commissioned by HP, compared Original HP LaserJet print cartridges with nine brands of remanufactured toner cartridges sold in North America for the HP LaserJet 2300 (Q2473A) and HP LaserJet 4350 (Q5407A) printers. 24 cartridges were tested for each brand in the study.

Highlights of the study include:

• More than 33% of tested remanufactured toner cartridges experienced problems.
• Nearly 7% of tested remanufactured toner cartridges failed prematurely – some right out of the box.
• For more than 25% of the tested remanufactured cartridges tested, 50% or more pages inspected were of limited or no use.

According to the study, and HP, a set of Original HP Color LaserJet printer toner cartridges can cost up to $76 less than remanufactured cartridges when you factor in the costs of reprinting pages that don’t meet business customers’ standards for external distribution.

Speaking from my own experience, I have had terrible luck buying the bargain cartridges. They have leaked all over me and the insides of my printer. My printed pages were not usable. I have never had an issue when I’ve used genuine HP cartridges. But, it still pains me to shell out big bucks for their cartridges.

How to Extend the Life of Your Toner Cartridges

Here are a few tips for extending the life of your toner cartridges:

• If you are getting a Low Toner alert, remove the cartridge and gently shake it from side to side.
• Check your printer’s settings. Some printers allow you to disable the “Replace Supplies” or “Page Count” limits.
• Do a quick search of the internet for your printer model to see if there is a way to “trick” the sensor into printing beyond it’s preset limit.
• For color printers, change your printer defaults to black & white. Most of your printouts probably don’t need color.
• Switch to a lower print quality for most printouts. You can always print at the best quality for that presentation, but not for everyday use.

View the entire QualityLogic report here.

IT Support Dallas

Tech Central is now a Clear 4G WiMAX Dealer. Wireless Internet from Clear allows you to replace your home or small business Internet connection with super-fast 4G wireless. You can also replace your existing 3G laptop air cards with 4G wireless cards from Clear – often at substantial monthly savings.

What is Clear?

CLEAR 4G WiMAX is next generation mobile internet from Clearwire that works as fast around town as it does at home. Because CLEAR covers DFW you don’t have to find a hotspot—the hotspot goes with you, anywhere CLEAR has coverage.

Clear Technology

Today’s mobile networks were mostly designed for making phone calls (using 3G or Third Generation technology). However, the CLEAR 4G WiMAX network is being built with the internet in mind (using 4G technology). What does that mean? That means service that goes beyond today’s 2G, 3G and even Wi-Fi hotspots. Expect a better online experience for email, videos or music downloads and whatever you need to get done on the web.

Dallas Data Recovery & IT Support

It would be hard to believe that every technology fan on the planet hadn’t already heard the news, that Apple Computer introduced its new 3GS series of iPhones recently. Here at DriveSavers, we’re celebrating the introduction of Apple’s new iPhones and reflecting on our past successes.
 
As many of our partners are aware, DriveSavers was the first company to recover iPhone data, and the jobs we’ve received have been challenging to say the least. Nearly every iPhone we’ve worked on suffered some kind of physical damage. Some ended up being waterlogged when they were dropped in lakes, ponds and toilets. Others met their fate as they literally “hit the pavement”.
 
To date, our most spectacular save was the iPhone that was intentionally dropped 26 stories down a garbage chute in a New York City apartment building, by an angry wife. With the odds stacked against us, we completed a full recovery of the critical data – in this case, they were photos needed by the disgruntled woman’s spouse.
 
Today, DriveSavers is celebrating its continued success recovering data using a myriad of new techniques we’ve developed along the way, streamlining the process with increased capabilities, recovering not only the most common kinds of important data: photos, notes and contacts, but even deleted text messages!
 
Mike Cobb, Director of Mac and UNIX Engineering summed things up, “When it comes to iPhone data recovery, our capabilities are unmatched.”

© 2010 DriveSavers Data Recovery Inc.

Dallas IT Support

Don’t you just love it when everything works like it’s supposed to? I know our clients do. It’s another great example of process-driven IT support at work. As the Saints and Colts were preparing to square off in Super Bowl XLIV, our client was able to relax and enjoy the game, knowing that their network was in good hands. Here is their story…

In the early morning hours of Super Bowl Sunday, one of our clients had a server hang on a scheduled reboot. Thanks to our 24/7 Network Monitoring, our team of Network Administrators was alerted to the issue immediately. We began work on resolving the issue remotely, and contacted our client to let them know about the issue. Turns out, they had some employees scheduled to come in on Sunday to do some work before the big game. Clearly there was a sense of urgency to keep them productive and get them home before kickoff.

After our attempts at remote resolution were unsuccessful, we dispatched a technician to the client site to resolve the issue. Once on-site, our technician was able to resolve the issue before there was an impact on productivity, and everyone was able to get their work done without missing the game.

While the rest of the world was preparing for the Super Bowl with snacks and parties, Tech Central’s team was hard at work avoiding an IT disaster. Like I said, I love it when everything works like it’s supposed to.

by Mark Stone

There I was, staring at a blank document, trying to come up with an idea of what topic to base my weekly article on this week. Several different topics were coming to mind, but nothing stood out. As my mind started to wander off, I looked at my Apple laptop and wondered what I would do if I ever lost it. I think I’d have a myocardial infarction! Then it hit me: I can’t believe I haven’t written about laptop theft yet.

The statistics on laptop theft are downright astounding. According to Safeware, North America’s largest computer insurance company, 600,000 laptop thefts occurred in 2004. This accounted for $720 million in hardware losses; much worse yet is the $5.4 billion in theft of proprietary information. According to the FBI, 97% of stolen laptops are never recovered, and the chances of a laptop being stolen are one in ten. I could go on, but I’m sure you get the picture.

Gartner Group has stated that a whopping 73% of companies do not have specific security policies for their computers. Incorporating laptops into your company security policy is extremely important. Rules should be clearly defined as to what is expected of laptop owners. Due to the risk of having proprietary or confidential information being compromised, the best thing all of us can do would be to encrypt any sensitive data stored on the laptop.

What does it mean to encrypt data on a laptop? Encryption achieves the goal of making any sensitive data unreadable and unavailable to prying eyes. It’s just like when our web browsers jumble the information between our computer and our bank when we’re doing online banking. When a hard drive (or specific folders of a hard drive) is encrypted, it is done so with a key, or password, which is used to decrypt the information. Without that key, the would-be thief cannot get at that information.

Going through all the steps necessary to encrypt data on the hard drive is well beyond the scope of this article. The good news is there is a program available that is free to download and use that will go a long way in protecting your sensitive data. I encourage everyone to visit www.truecrypt.org, where you can find out more about how easy it is to protect your data. There is good documentation available on the site and the download is available for free.

The trickle-down effect of laptop loss and theft is becoming more severe as we retain more and more data. Encrypting the information stored on our laptops is just one large step to take in preventing the worst-case scenarios. The old adage of an ounce of prevention’ couldn’t be more appropriate for this issue. Take the time to protect yourself or your company.

For more information on protecting your laptop and encrypting your data, call Tech Central at 972.996.6650