Before You Take Your Computer In For Service …

It’s a good idea to back up your data. Why? Just read this story from Consumerist. Long story short, the computer place screwed up and now people don’t have their data. The first mistake was not backing up their data. The second mistake was going to THAT computer store. It’s widely known that they’ve failed on multiple occasions. Plenty of blame to go around. I’m curious to know who’s actually doing the recovery service on the store’s behalf, because I’m fairly certain there’s nobody there competent enough to perform data recovery. Hopefully one of the bigger companies will catch wind of the story and offer up some discounted service for the poor couple. Don’t trust the computer place to protect your data, perform regular backups. AND don’t buy the extended warranty! It’s a complete waste of money.

Disaster Proof Backup

For many companies struggling to keep up with user demands a data disaster is just a few hours away. Business demands are relying heavily on information management and protection. Backup technology has moved up the ladder of importance as well as practices to limit data loss and data recovery scenarios. The focus has been on fortifying data centers with multiple and redundancy checks. Better to be over-cautious then explaining to the boss why the company servers are down. However the costs are often enough to force small and midsized companies down the riskier road. Backup systems are getting expensive and complex to manage and often get outsourced. Off-site backups still leaves room for downtime but paying someone else to do the job is usually cheaper than investing in an entire department of your own.

A few companies have come out with their own black box built to withstand all kinds of data disasters. The unit uses solid state drives raided together to provide the ultimate backup system. Remote access, full encryption, and software to help you manage your data.

Netgear bolsters NAS lineup

The ReadyNAS NVX (NAS and iSCSI support) a storage system for SOHO. Features file sharing, remote access, easy backup and data recovery for users with limited IT knowledge. Windows, UNIX/Linux and Mac operating systems. Perfect for server storage email, SQL, and other databases. Support for Time Machine (Mac), Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), Bonjour software (device auto discovery) attached to the LAN. Multiple PCs backed up to a single destination for quick recovery from data failures. Bi-directional backup using SMB or CIFS, HTTP, FTP, NFS and rsync. Three 2.0 USB ports, RAID 0/1/5, encryption/SSL, quiet sync and smart sync resume, FAT32, Ext2, Ext3, and NTFS.

4 drive bay storage available now for $1,500 for 2 TB of storage capacity. Full 24/7 technical support and a 5 year warranty. Free 30 day online backup service for all ReadyNAS systems ($5.95/month for end users, $19.95/month commercial). Netgear ReadyNAS

Online Storage to be a luxury?

Let’s face it, we’ve been spoiled when it comes to storage of online data. Whether it’s Facebook or MySpace, or Google, Yahoo, or MSN, we’ve all benefited from free online storage services. But perhaps the good times are over. With the current economic situation, offering these luxury services for free may be a thing of the past. HP recently announced that it would be shutting down it’s online storage services. This follows a previous announcement by Yahoo to end it’s 10 year old program “Briefcase“. So far nothing announced from Google.

Companies tend to scale back on their service offering when times get tough. The Internet is no different. Free online data storage may soon be a thing of the past. Reflecting on your current backup routine it’s a good time to revisit good old trusty CD-R and DVD-R backups. They are cheap, fast, and accessible to almost everyone. Perhaps it’s something you should consider instead of buying that 1TB external drive to back up your photos or accounting data. Old technology doesn’t mean that they are still not useful.

SanDisk flash USB backup drives

Such a hassle to have to plug a thumb drive in and copy stuff over. Well SanDisk is taking “all” of the work out of the backup process. Enter SanDisk Ultra Backup. A simple button does the trick by backing up your data up to 64GB. As well the little unit supports AES hardware encryption for all of that porn you don’t want the airport guy to see. Should be out first quarter of 2009.

However despite the new product line demand for NAND memory chips is expected to fall. SanDisk and Toshiba temporarily shut down their facilities for 2 weeks during the holidays and planned to run their facilities at 70% capacity until the economic situation improved. So far no announcements from the other NAND producer Samsung. Expect memory prices to go up this year.