News and Knowledge

Burst Pipe Cripples Dallas County: Would Your Company Survive?

Posted by Andy at *

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?

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Warning: You’re Causing Permanent Data Loss

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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.

Remote Network Monitoring to the Rescue

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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:

Are Bargain Toner Cartridges Really a Better Value?

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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.

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Tech Central is a Clear 4G Wireless Dealer

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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.

iPhone Data Recovery-The Next Generation

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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.
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Tech Central’s Super Bowl Save

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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…

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Protect Yourself from Laptop Theft

Posted by Dallas IT Solutions at *

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. Keep Reading…

Advantages of Employee Internet Monitoring in the Workplace

Posted by Dallas IT Solutions at *

by Todd Pheifer

The Internet has changed how everything is done in modern society. Some of this change is obviously positive, but with any change comes the possibility that things could get abused. Just about every industry makes use of the Internet in one way or another whether it is for research, communication, or organizational infrastructure. Employees in many different firms are on the Internet throughout the day. The challenge for organizations lies in regulating this usage. As with any other medium, not all Internet usage is for professional reasons. Therefore, some companies have taken the step of monitoring the Internet usage of their employees. Here are a few advantages to this practice. Keep Reading…

How to Recognize and Protect Yourself from Phishing Scams

Posted by Dallas IT Solutions at *

by Brian Lamacraft

Using the Internet can be a dangerous place if you are not careful. The use of email programs can be a way for criminals and hackers to get into your personal data by the means of what we call phishing. This term means to “fish” or in other words the criminal sends you a piece of information that seems legitimate and tries to entice you into filling in a form or going to a website to complete a form and then using this to steal your data, money or even your entire identity. Keep Reading…