Is RAID 5 really protecting your data?

Big Question… What RAID5 is for?

As part of our data recovery business, every now and then we receive quote request on data recovery from a RAID server. So what really happened? A drive failed, reconstruction failed and vendor phone support was disastrous. Can you recover our data?

The worst of it was that there was no backup. They believed that RAID 5 would protect their data and they were wrong.

RAID 5 does offer some data protection assuming it works. But it’s main purpose is to protect access to your data.

This is why it is popular in enterprise applications where maintaining data access during a failure is of vital concern. But these arrays are always backed up so that if there is a catastrophic array failure – a not uncommon occurrence – the data is still recoverable despite the interruption in service.

That’s how it played out with the small company. After the drive fail they still had access to their data. But when they replaced the drive the rebuild did not go as expected. They were stuck. If they had stopped there and made a backup they probably could’ve saved all their data. But they thought the RAID was there to protect their data.

Most enterprise RAID today do not use RAID5 because the likelihood of a second failure during the rebuild – increasingly lengthy because of growing drive size – means that the likelihood of a second failure during rebuild is too high for comfort.

Note that this does not mean a second drive has to fail: it can be as simple as an unrecoverable read error on a remaining drive that totally pooches the rebuild. Then you have to go to your backup – assuming you have a backup.

Talk to easySERVICE Disaster recovery team today and let the experts help you protecting your data. Disasters that threaten a business can happen anywhere at any time. But no matter how it is caused, a loss of data, or access to data for any kind of extended period, inevitably means a loss of revenue, a loss of productivity, a loss of reputation, and increased costs.

Put us to the test today!  Don’t be a victim of low prices and false promises. We guarantee our service standards.

• Call us at 1 855 BY STELLAR (297 8355) .
• You may also visit our web site directly to learn more about our capabilities

We are committed to building the value of the easySERVICE brand and we stand behind our service to you. We want to earn your trust and confidence as your “go-to source” when you have data retrieval challenges.

 

Free tools for all of your basic business needs

Introducing new software into a typical small business environment can be costly, to say the least. Depending on the size of your business, buying multiple copies of a program or its licenses can quickly drive your balance sheet into the red. The alternative isn’t especially appealing, however. Sifting through the Web in the hopes of finding an effective no-cost software solution could wind up costing a small business just as much time, money, and manpower to use effectively as it would have cost to buy a fully functional app in the first place.

Below, you’ll find 10 superb pieces of software for most major business functions which can create a front-to-back resource for getting your business up and running at the low cost that can increase productivity without decreasing your bank account. A word of warning, however: Free software isn’t always the deal it appears to be. Premium software is paid because it typically comes with frequent updates and a helpful support staff that’s just a phone call away.

1. Operating system: Ubuntu Linux-  The cost of Windows licenses adds up quickly, whereas open-source Linux costs nary a dime. Ubuntu is a pretty darn good operating system, too, provided your workforce doesn’t mind abandoning the familiarity of the traditional Windows desktop for more uncharted waters.

2. Productivity suite: LibreOffice-  It’s fair to say that one of the biggest challenges businesses face in abandoning the tried-and-true-(and-pricy) Microsoft Office suite for a freeware office package like LibreOffice is compatibility.

3. Security: Windows Defender / Microsoft Security Essentials-  While different kinds of businesses might need more robust security options than Microsoft’s free solutions provide, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with keeping Microsoft’s highly functional (and highly free) antivirus app in your back pocket for any systems that need basic protection. Just don’t expect the apps to do a great job of reporting to a centralized authority about viruses found or updates needed. Another powerful app worth checking out is the free version of Comodo Internet Security.

4. Email: Zimbra Desktop-  Zimbra Desktop includes all of the staple elements of a desktop email client, such as a mail interface, a calendar, task lists, an offline mode, et cetera. The app also includes a section that allows users to keep tabs on social hotsposts like Twitter and Facebook; more business-friendly services like WebEx and LinkedIn; and general services like Yahoo Web Search and Local lookups.

5. Project management: Freedcamp-  Freedcamp allows you to create projects, within which you can create and assign tasks to various users within your organization. (Due dates appear on a separate calendar.) When users log into their accounts, they’re presented with an easy-to-digest dashboard featuring all the activity that’s going on within a particular project, as well as to-do items and larger “Where are we on the overall timeline?” milestone elements that define what you’re working on.

6. Human resource management: OrangeHRM-  Managing your human resources is critical in all but the smallest of one-person businesses, and keeping track of your employees’ information in a thrown-together spreadsheet just won’t cut it. That doesn’t mean you need to spend an arm and a leg on premium human resource management software, however. OrangeHRM—a completely free and open-source HR system—spins a number of common HR “modules” around a single, centralized controller system.

7. Website design: Weebly-  If you know absolutely nothing about Web design but still want some kind of Web presence that’s better than an about.me page or a default parked domain page, Weebly’s your best friend. The free version of this Web app allows you to create a simple site—hosted by Weebly itself—that you build by dragging and dropping various page elements over a variety of preset templates.

8. Customer relations management: ZohoCRM-  ZohoCRM helps businesses keep track of customers (and potential customers), conduct email marketing campaigns, capture opt-in lead generation, keep a finger on the pulse of sales pipelines, manage sales opportunities, and more—all through a single, easy-to-use Web interface. ZohoCRM’s free version supports 100 megabytes of total storage and up to 100,000 records.

9. Accounting: GnuCash-  GnuCash is an open-source accounting program that uses a checkbook-style interface to track basic incomes and expenditures. And, because this app’s uses the double-billing accounting method, it assists you in balancing your books by ensuring that your cross-account transactions match up.

10. Email marketing: MailChimp-  MailChimp’s free as in “freemium,” but its gratisoffering is actually pretty gracious. The free tier of this popular email marketing management service lets you send up to 12,000 emails per month to a list that’s no larger than 2,000 email addresses. In other words, you can’t blast the world, but the typical small business can certainly email a significant portion of its customer base.

Warning: Before installing any software on your desktop/Laptop always do your own little research and beware of any hidden virus or malware infection. Don’t let a malware infection slow you down. Come and speak to us to know more.

We believe that the safest way to store your data is through a multi-layered strategy involving multiple storage locations and real-time backups. But should disaster strike anyway, you can trust Stellar Phoenix to recover your data and help you get back to business.

Call us at 1-855-BY-STELLAR (297 8355) or click here to complete a service request form.
You may also visit our website directly to learn more about our capabilities.

We stand behind our service to you. Let Stellar Phoenix be your go-to source whenever you have data retrieval challenges.

Is your Business ready for the Cloud?

For some, the term is wildly nebulous. Not long ago, even Oracle’s Larry Ellison publicly asked what the heck people meant by “the cloud.” For others, cloud computing instantly raises concerns about security and reliability.

Do you know what Does Cloud Computing really Mean?

For decades, engineers have drawn a cloud to depict a network (such as the Internet) whose inner workings were unknown to them. From there, cloud computing evolved as a term to describe free or subscription-based services delivered in real time over the Internet. We queried dozens of small businesses about the cloud services they use, and why they use them. Among the most popular services were these:

• Google Apps ($50 per user per year) and Google Docs (free) are offerings from the Google cloud empire. Google Apps is a business-class version of Google Docs and includes souped-up Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs (for word processing, spreadsheet, presentations and forms) components along with administration capabilities.
• Box.net (free for 1GB of storage; $10 for an individual plan; $15 monthly for three or more users) is an online workspace service for file sharing and collaboration.
• QuickBooks Online ($10 to $35 per month), unlike QuickBooks installed on PCs, makes collaboration easy across a small team.
• Skype is popular for its free video chats as well as for the low-cost calls to landline and cell phones that it makes possible.
• Highrise for CRM and Basecamp for project management ($24 to $149 per month each, depending on the level of service you choose) both come from 37 signals. A number of small businesses we contacted recommended these services for their feature sets and ease of use.

Bright side of Cloud Computing

Cloud-based services can help small businesses dramatically reduce their software and other computing costs. Storing files on a secure, reliable, cloud-based service helps eliminate backup worries and gives you anytime access to your files.

Usually, cloud-based services are simple to use—the only things you need are a computer (or in some cases, a mobile handset), a browser, and an Internet connection. And such services require no maintenance from the user.

The Cloud’s Dark Side

The biggest misgiving that most businesses have about the cloud involves security. They said that their biggest worries about cloud computing were, in descending order, security, availability, and performance.

It’s not difficult to find instances of security breaches in cloud computing, of course. On the other hand, you can’t entirely eliminate risk from any computing environment. Intruders may hack into files stored on your business’s own servers or hard drives. Hard drives may fail. Unencrypted information stored on laptops may lead to identity theft or lawsuits when the laptops go missing.

Here are some other commonly cited concerns about cloud computing:

• Privacy: How much data are cloud companies like Google collecting about you, and how might that information be used?
• Availability: Will your cloud service go down unexpectedly, leaving you without access to critical customer records, e-mail, or other information for hours or more? Gmail outages are widely reported, but Salesforce.com and other well-established services have gone dark on occasion, too.
• Data loss: Some online storage sites have shut down abruptly, sending users scrambling to recover their data, sometimes with only 24 hours’ notice. And T-Mobile Sidekick users were unhappy to discover that their personal data had been erased from their devices–especially when Microsoft said that the data loss was irrevocable. (A few days later, Microsoft announced that it had recovered most of the data.)
• Data mobility and ownership: Will you be able to share data between different cloud services? If you decide to stop using a cloud service, can you get all of your data back? What format will it be in? How can you be certain that the cloud service will destroy all of your data once you’ve severed ties with it?
• Tool robustness: Cloud-based tools frequently aren’t as powerful as software applications. Google Docs, for instance, lacks a number of features that Microsoft Office has had for years, such as the ability to track changes in a text file.

At Stellar Phoenix, we want to improve your backup strategy, not fix it. And we believe that the safest way to store your data is through a multi-layered strategy involving multiple storage locations and real-time backups. But should disaster strike anyway, you can trust Stellar Phoenix to recover your data and help you get back to business.

• Call us at 1-855-BY-STELLAR (297 8355) or click here to complete a service request form.
• You may also visit our website directly to learn more about our capabilities.

We stand behind our service to you. Let Stellar Phoenix be your go-to source whenever you have data retrieval challenges.

Source: PC World

Related articles

• What is the CLOUD computing? (introstatcloud.wordpress.com)
• Are you ready for Google Drive? (techi.com)
• Can Cloud Computing Save Money? (blogs.sap.com)
• All Your Google Docs Files Are Being Moved To Google Drive [Updates] (makeuseof.com)

What do you know of ROI on Data Loss..?

One data loss incident can result in continuous cost. After making affected customers whole, conducting an internal investigation, repairing any damage to internal systems, and dealing with expected litigation, you can count on external audits, increased regulatory oversight, and a damaged reputation to stay with you for a while.

Without question, a data loss is not a one-time cost. Even after your operations have recovered, effects of the data loss could continue to impact your business for a decade or longer. One mistake can have far-reaching consequences, and a serious loss may mean that your business never recovers—or at least never returns to “normal.”

The cost of the data loss incident is determined by the size and nature of the organization, the sensitivity of the data that was lost, and the size of the incident itself. The cost of data loss can vary, especially as the far-reaching effects can be difficult to gauge. Forrester Research estimates that the average data leak results in $1.5 million in economic damage, while The Ponemon Institute pegs the amount at $4.8 million.

Data loss prevention provides a sound cost-avoidance strategy and can positively impact revenue—saving hundreds of millions of dollars with little upfront investment. The risk of damage extends beyond your company, ultimately affecting customers, business partners, and other stakeholders that can affect your business for many years.

The direct costs of intellectual property loss typically include:

• Fees for legal recourse to address who leaked the data and discover if it was being used inappropriately
• Short-term impact to R&D cost recuperation
  •  Key variable(s): assets stage in its lifecycle
• Long-term impact to profitability/revenue projections
  • Key variable(s): assets stage in its lifecycle, reproducibility, market demand
• System and process audits to identify and correct the source of the data loss.

After a data loss event, organizations may face two costly professional service engagements: Periodic audits and process redesign.

A simple data loss that results in the loss of 100,000 customer records can turn into a direct and immediate cost of $21.8 million. To put this number in perspective, an employee who generates $1,000 in revenue per hour would have to work for 21,800 hours—a total of 109 years—in order to compensate for the loss.(See Figures)

Thus, the direct cost of a 100,000-record leak could amount to a minimum of $35.8 million over five years, averaging $7.2 million per year (See Figures).

The cost-per-record estimates from Forrester and Ponemon only address certain direct, indirect, and opportunity costs associated with the loss of customers affected by the leak. In high-profile cases, a company can expect to lose even more, as unaffected customers no longer find their business credible. Forrester estimates that a company can expect to lose up to 20 percent of their customer base because of a data loss.

Disasters that threaten a business can happen anywhere at any time. But no matter how it is caused, a loss of data, or access to data for any kind of extended period, inevitably means a loss of revenue, a loss of productivity, a loss of reputation, and increased costs.

Put us to the test today!  Don’t be a victim of low prices and false promises. We guarantee our service standards.

• Call us at 1 855 BY STELLAR (297 8355) or click here to complete a service request form.
• You may also visit our web site directly to learn more about our capabilities

We are committed to building the value of the Stellar Phoenix brand and we stand behind our service to you. We want to earn your trust and confidence as your “go-to source” when you have data retrieval challenges.

Related articles

• Markel, Experian to Offer Data Breach Loss Control Resources (insurancejournal.com)
• Almost 50% of organizations report 10 or more significant data breaches a year (brianpennington.co.uk)
• Glasgow City Council puts data at risk as 750 computers go missing (itpro.co.uk)

How often do you Clear Space on Your Laptop’s Hard Drive?

 

Do you live with a thin-and-light laptop that has a small drive? Or just have a large drive that’s filled to overflowing? Here’s how to get some breathing room back.

It’s all too easy to run out of disk space.

That’s true whether you have a gigantic hard drive quickly filling up with applications, movies, music, and photos or live with one of the newer ultrathin laptops sporting fast but tiny solid-state drives that can’t hold much to begin with.

Thankfully, lots of easy ways exist to reclaim hard-drive space and keep the dreaded “out-of-disk-space” warnings away. Let’s check some of them out.

Clean Up Files You No Longer Need

The first step is to get rid of the common space-hogging culprits. These include unnecessary applications and a variety of useless system files. Your Recycle Bin, Temp folders, and random system files may be hogging gigabytes of potential free space. Microsoft’s built-in disk cleaner, Windows Disk Cleanup, will free up this space for you.

Go to the Start menu, type disk cleanup in the search box, and press Enter for the screen where you can whisk these items away.

You can also schedule Disk Cleanup to run regularly in Windows’ Task Scheduler. Here’s how:

Click the Start button, type Task Scheduler in the search form, and press Enter. Under the Actions menu, select Create Basic Task. Follow the wizard to enter a description and set a daily/weekly/other schedule, then type cleanmgr.exe in the Filename box to schedule it. Easy.

That method runs Disk Cleanup at a set time but still requires your input. If you want to run Disk Cleanup in the background without your supervision, you can create a scheduled task to do this using the command line:

• Go to the Start menu, enter cmd in the search box, and press Enter to open the Command Prompt.
• Type cleanmgr.exe /sageset:1 to open the Disk Cleanup settings.
• Select the types of files you always want to delete and press OK. This will create a Registry key to save these cleanup settings, and also run Disk Cleanup right now.
• Then go into Task Scheduler as mentioned above (Start > Task Scheduler > Create Basic Task), and when you get to the Scheduled Task program screen, enter /sagerun:1 in the arguments (in addition to “cleanmgr.exe” for the filename) to apply the cleanup settings.

Here are some other areas to consider for cleanup.

Uninstall Unnecessary Applications: At one point or another most of us have installed programs we thought we would use, or just wanted to try, but ultimately don’t need.

To get rid of those unnecessary applications, such as old games or tax software good for only one year, go to the Start menu, then Control Panel, and click Programs and Features. Select the program or programs you want to uninstall, and click the Uninstall button at the top.

Also, if you have more than one video player or music player or other types of duplicate applications, get rid of the dupes. One folder you should definitely weed out regularly is the Downloads folder. If you ever want to reinstall a program, chances are you’ll want to use the latest version available from the developer’s website rather than the dated one you downloaded long ago into that catch-all folder, so feel free to delete those old installation files.

Target Large and Duplicate Files

If you’ve done the above, you’ve made a big improvement in your hard drive space usage, but now let’s dig deeper.

To find out what’s really taking the most amount of space on your hard drive, use a disk space analyzer. WinDirStat (free) scans your drive to show you graphically how much space each file takes up. Select the large blocks in WinDirStat to hone in on the files that are taking up the most space—and are therefore candidates for deletion.

Auslogics Duplicate File Finder (free) finds those pesky files you’ve stored in more than one folder. You can also search solely for duplicate files that take up a large amount of space, quickly identifying the worst offenders.

Move Key Folders to an External Drive

Perhaps the easiest way to slim up your system is to expand your space with an external drive. With a cheap USB hard drive or even a flash memory card, you can store your growing collection of photos and videos off of your computer and use your primary drive just for launching your operating system and applications quickly.

Prices on external drives have dropped dramatically recently, so you can have tons of cheap space just for this purpose. If you’re really stuck on space, you can move your whole My Documents folder to another location (that is, another drive). Best part is that you have total control over your data. Restoring is a breeze.

Just make sure that you have a backup system in place for the files on your external drive, as you would (or should) for your internal drive. Back up the folders both locally and with online backup services like Crashplan and Backblaze, which can back up external drives.

Store on the Web

Cloud storage services offer tons of free space online you can use instead of your hard drive. To really save space, though, the service you use will have to let you either simply upload your files without having to sync them, as Box does, or exclude some folders from syncing (otherwise, you’ll still have those folders and files stored on your computer). SkyDrive and SugarSync don’t seem to have this selective syncing feature, but Dropbox and Google Drive both do.

For Dropbox, go to the Dropbox preferences, then the Advanced tab, and click the Selective Sync button.

This is a great way to keep large folders like videos and photos in your online storage space and remove them from your computer’s hard drive.  However, online backup has its flaws too. For one, restoring files is not as convenient as it should be. File retrieval can take up to days for large volumes of files or restoring the entire contents of your computer. You should also remember that you are depending on a third party for the security of your important files and data.

Run Software in Your Browser

Finally, Web-based software can often rival desktop software in functionality—and such programs are often free. Instead of installing an office suite on your computer, you can use Google Docs or run Microsoft Office Web apps from within SkyDrive online.

Pixlr Editor can substitute for the space-hungry Photoshop for photo editing, PDFescape does the job of Adobe Acrobat, Screenr is an online screen recorder that can replace Camtasia, and, instead of Quicken for your personal finances, you could try Mint or Adaptu.

So don’t feel cramped if you have a small hard drive. Use some of these strategies and you may find your hard drive to be bigger than you thought.

At Stellar Phoenix, we want to improve your backup strategy, not fix it. And we believe that the safest way to store your data is through a multi-layered strategy involving multiple storage locations and real-time backups. But should disaster strike anyway, you can trust Stellar Phoenix to recover your data and help you get back to business.

Call us at 1-855-BY-STELLAR (297 8355) or click here to complete a service request form. You may also visit our web site directly to learn more about our capabilities.

We stand behind our service to you. Let Stellar Phoenix be your go-to source whenever you have data retrieval challenges.

Source: PC World, CIO

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