Backing up Office Files Offsite

Backups are often thought of way too late. I see it everyday, and I am even guilty of it many times. I'll often store important documents that I have only one copy of on my laptop. BAD IDEA! Why? Well because the hard drive in my laptop costs about $29.95 on eBay, and can die at any given moment. Dying with it would be my only copies of important documents.

So what do I do? I'll tell you what I would do. First I would get a Snapserver 410 made by Adaptec. They're reasonably priced for the performance they provide. The 410 will give you 1 TB of NAS (Network Attached Storage) storage capacity. As long as you are only backing up critical files this should give any small business a good start towards a comprehensive backup strategy. You'll also have to have an Ethernet office network in place to allow all computers to connect to the snapserver.

Then add the snapserver to your network. It's pretty straight forward. Once you have the snap in place and operational you need to start backing up data to it. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is to create a share on the snap and save all important folders and files to it. Then if you need to recover them, simply copy them from the snap back to your computer.

You could also automate the process by writing a simple batch file that just copies important files from your machines in the office to the snap. Then create scheduled tasks that execute the batch file on the machines that need to be backed up nightly. Viola! A simple, cheap, and powerful backup strategy for your average small office. The Snapserver uses RAID technology to ensure data protection. There are four hard drives and depending on how you configure the box, you can lose a couple drives and still have all of your data.

If you have several terabytes of critical data I would look at another type of solution, like a SAN. This would be for larger offices or small companies working with huge amounts of data. But it provides a lot of redundancy and the most up time.

If you want to take the first step above and really be smart, you could just get another snapserver, and configure it exactly as the first one. And maybe weekly switch the second one with the first one. When you pull the first one out of service take it off site, the whole box.

Then should the office burn to the ground, be swept away in a flood, or blown to bits by tornado, your mission critical data is recovered by plugging in the second snapserver you took off site. It may not be a complete set of data, but it will be much better than losing EVERYTHING. And it will be complete up until the time you took it off site. So the more often you take it off site, the more complete the data will be.

Don't think about your backup and disaster recovery strategies after something happens and you lose critical data. It will be way too late then.

Verizon Alltel Merger

Well if you live in Carteret County, you probably know Alltel has the best reception in most areas compared to other carriers. But now with Verizon buying Alltel will this still be the case? Will you still be able to use your Alltel phone on the Verizon network? All sorts of questions come to mind when you begin to think about the merger of these two cell phone providers.

I recently switched to Verizon, and was unhappy because it seemed that I have little to no reception in places my Alltel phone would have full bars. So I am hoping that between the two of them, I should now have excellent coverage anywhere I go.

From what I've read if you currently use Alltel, you will likely automatically be converted to a Verizon customer. However, as part of the deal Verizon had to sell assets in 105 markets. So you actually could end up with a completely different carrier. The FCC forced this to preserve some competition in the 105 markets.

If you have an Alltel plan will you still be able to take advantage of My-Circle? Well that's still up in the air as Verizon is currently evaluating that. But in the near future Alltel customers will enjoy free mobile-to-mobile calls even to Verizon phone numbers. I thought that was pretty cool.

Your Alltel phone should work just fine on the Verizon network, so there should be no need to upgrade. Both carriers use the same technology in their network architecture.

Will annoying Alltel commercials go away? Gosh I sure hope so. But judging from the new Verizon campaign about "dead zones" I think Verizon's marketing team can do much better than the Chad commercials.

What about all of those Alltel stores? Well they'll remain open in the short term. But I think they will likely start closing some of them before too long.

Google Does it Again

Well I just got blown away today. I like to think I am totally in tune with what Google is doing and where they're going with certain things. However, I was totally surprised by what they've done with the maps.

A friend of mine at work and i were looking at something on the map and i was showing him where I lived on the Crystal Coast. Pretty normal stuff. Then he said, "Oh street view." I was at the helm with the mouse and I said, "What?"

"What the heck is street view?"

Well then he showed me that a lot of places on the map have this new "street view" available. On some maps there is a little icon that looks like an orange man. You click on him:






And you can then make the little man walk right by your house, your friend's house, or even a place you were thinking of moving into. For instance I could have looked at my house before I moved in.

I tried embedding the streetview so you could see it, but no love. So here's the link here.

2008 Traffic Stats for Crystal Coast News

Well last year at about this time, I started working on my first blog. Crystal Coast News was kind of an experiment really. But I thouroughly enjoyed writing the many fishing reports, restaurant reviews, and of course the few tips I offered rental owners. But at the end of the year, I was slightly disappointed with my traffic stats. I had only 6,148 visits, 5,106 of which were absolutely unique visitors. 

One cool thing I noticed, was when I looked at the map in my Google Analytics account. . 171 visitors were from outside the United States...That's Crystal Coast News is now internationally known. :) There were many folks outside of NC coming to my site too. Virginaia leads the way with 397 visitors. I even had 81 visits from Califiornia. Perhaps they were looking for another Crystal Coast? But I really like showing potential advertising clients the NC map.

I really thought that more people were looking for Crystal Coast information. But then it dawned on me...people are looking for Crystal coast topics, just the majority of them are looking for rentals, and rental information. That's why I started on a new rentals site this year.

Emerald Isle Rentals by Owner

PHEW! That's all I can really say. I've been very busy over the last couple weeks working on a new rentals by owner site for Emerald Isle, Atlantic Beach, and the rest of the Crystal Coast. I spent many nights writing code until the wee hours to get this project wrapped up. It's still in BETA, but I think it's a pretty solid application. If you have a rental property you want to list, or just want to see what it's all about check out Crystal Coast Rentals and let me know what you think.

It's just a Wordpress blog for the home pages to help with SEO. Plus it lets me generate content quickly and easily. But once you start searching for rentals, or adding your rental, those are the pages I developed myself. I'm pretty proud of it since it was my first attempt at using PHP and MySQL to develop dynamic web pages.

It's currently completely free for homeowners to list their property. So if you're a Crystal Coast rental owner, you should list yours while you can for free. Once I have 50 properties in there, it will cost a reasonable fee to list your rental. Well that's it for now, as I need to get blogging to promote these new features I've added.