A data backup, by definition, means that your important data is in more than one place.

What we often see is that people have purchased an external hard drive, or a usb flash drive, and that’s a giant step in the right direction.However, if all of your important data is stored ONLY on those aforementioned devices, then that is NOT a backup.

External Hard drives, USB Flash drives, or any external storage device for that matter, is equally susceptible to failure as your internal storage devices.

Also, simply having one of these devices is not necessarily going to automagically back your data up. A great deal of these storage devices come with complimentary software to help you set up the backup, but they don’t start doing it on their own.

Also, backups are not a “set up and forget about it” feature. Backup logs have to be looked at often to make sure they’re running successfully.

We prefer StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect software as part of our backup regime. Not only for our clients, but we use that software internally also.

In short, “all of your eggs in one basket” , or all of your data in one place, does not equal a backup.

Give us a ring if you have any further questions, we’re happy to help!

The synopsis is how painful it is to try to restore data from tapes, and how a minor mistake caused him to stay up 72 hour straight restoring about 1TB of data (just data) from tape (Been there, done that), how backing up to disk (hard drives) is superior in many ways, et cetera.

He took the words right out of our mouth. In fact, we kind of take this advice from this article for granted a little. We’ve actually been pushing our customers to disk based backup, and starting new systems with disk based backup straight out of the gate for several years now.

At one time, it simply was not close to affordable, especially for the SMB space, to even consider backing up to hard drives. We can definitely understand how in the past companies, especially SMB’s(we’re one ourselves), may have shied away this type of backup system. Those days are over.

Today, a 1TB USB hard drive will likely cost you anywhere between $150-200, and a 1TB has a fair chance of suiting the needs for how much data an SMB is likely to backup. (SMB sized graphic design firms, engineering, musicians, et cetera may need larger capacity)

For several years now we have also relied heavily on moving our customers away from what is known as simple “file level backup” (think Symantec BackupExec, ArcServ Brightsor, NTBackup, et cetera), and moved to “disk imaging” backup solutions. We’re a proud reseller of StorageCraft’s various flavors of “Shadow Protect”.

The difference is a file level backup does just that, only backs up files, not your installed programs, not your custom settings, not your user accounts, et cetera.

A disk imaging solution takes a snapshot of the entire contents of the hard drive, and duplicates the hard drive into a compressed “image file” , getting not only the data, but everything else as well.

Simply put, the superiority is in the restore process. Let’s face it, the most important factor of a backup is the restore process. Do you want to be back up and running in 4 hours, or 3 days?

Let’s say your Small Business Server had a complete hard drive failure:

With a file level backup, we’d first have to:

Replace the hard drive.
Reinstall the opearting sytem (easily half a day to a days work)
Restore the domain (if even possible)
Rebuild the domain from scratch (more often than not)
Restore the data.
Reinstall LOB software (as SBS servers often have multiple functions).
Reset customizations from memory.
Et Cetera.

All of this may very legitimately take your IT guy several days to accomplish.

Now let’s look at restoring from the kind of failure using a disk imaging solution:

Replace/repair hard drive system.
Boot to recovery CD.
Restore last full disk image.
Boot server.

ShadowProtect has a tried and true (we’ve done it several times) “Hardware Indepedent Restore” functionality with it that lets you restore your disk images to dissimilar hardware (barring any OEM licensing requirements, but that’s a different story).

Let’s examine that for a minute:

Your server has a complete hardware meltdown. Hard drives fail, motherboard fails, no identical motherboard replacement available, et cetera.

No problem

Boot your rescue CD on different server
Restore your image to a such said server.
Boot the server.

The entire contents of the server is contained in the image file, via a snapshot made at the point in time.
With Shadow Protect, if you have the proper storage system in place, you can easily take a snapshot of your server(s) every 15 minutes!

There are some pitfalls to the disk image backup that we like to cover by supplementing disk image backups with our cloud based file level backup service. We’d love to talk to you about those if you’re interested.

We think that disk image backups , specifically Shadow Protect, which we know works, is a no-brainer.

Before we tell the price, let me point out that we don’t put a lot of markup in the cost of the software that we sell. Notice we didn’t say there’s “no markup”, we said there’s “very little”. Truthfully, there’s close to no markup.

For home users, Shadow Protect Desktop edition is going to cost you about $100.00 for the software.

For SMB customers running an “SBS” flavor of Windows Server it’s going to cost you around $500.00

Selling software is honestly not our core business. Our core business is consulting and support. If you don’t want to visit the online store yourself, consider the markup on the software a convenience charge.

For non-SBS flavor servers, the software is going to cost you about $1000.00 per server.

While some some of these prices might sting, we strongly urge your to truly consider how much a week long server outage is going to cost you vs. the cost of a implementing a strong disaster recovery procedure before it’s too late.

Dale Needleman came by and picked up a slew of useless IT equipment we’ve had hanging around here for a while. We filled the entire back of a rather large SUV.

DAO’s venture is all around a great cause. At no charge to businesses like ours they’ll come get our unused IT equipment (we accumulate a lot as the nature of our business), and properly recycle and/or dispose of it. They’re certified by the EPA and have number of other accreditations.

Among this process, they’re employing people who might otherwise be unemployable.

They have a free drop of center as well for residential customers.

This is a win/win situation for all of greater Indianapolis.

Check them out today!

http://www.daorecycling.org

Dale E. Needleman
dale@daorecycling.org
Business Development Manager
317-697-0536

3518 E. Michigan
Indianapolis, IN, 46201

((click here for map))

The two products in question are “Rapport”, by software company Trusteer, and a piece of software called “KeyScrambler”, by QFX Software.

The blog posting explaining the Rapport software can be found by clicking here.

The blog posting explaining KeyScrambler can be found by clicking here.

Rapport is available free through Trusteer, in partnership with many financial institutions. It is only designed to protect websites that you deem important, and websites belonging to their partners.

KeyScrambler comes in a few different versions. The version we tested with was KeyScrambler Personal Edition (available for free), which like Rapport, is designed to only protect mainstream web browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox.

These are two different software products with various different features, costs, et cetera, but the idea behind each is that they attempt to encrypt (scramble into gibberish) your important information that you type into your web browser.

The idea is that if keylogging capable malware (viruses/spyware/rootkits/et cetera) is present on your computer, the software in question will attempt to encrypt (turn into gibberish) your usernames and passwords, so that the malware can’t steal them.

In theory, these are pretty cool products.

We decided to put these products to the test, and to test the product, we used some commercially available software that is used to monitor everything on a computer. The commercially available software we used was Spector Pro 2010, and this software records EVERYTHING! It takes screenshots, logs your keystrokes (our point of interest in this test), logs your browsing history, and much more.

Spector is typically used by employers to track their employees, or parents to track what their children are doing, and thus why it’s commercially available.

Spector Pro’s lightweight, very stealth, hard to detect, and is not detected by most mainstream anti-virus software.

The Spector Pro software can be found by clicking here.

What we found in short was that the Rapport software did not protect keystrokes against Spector, but KeyScrambler Personal edition did.

To be fair with Trusteer (makers of Rapport), they have been very accommodating in terms of trying to get to the bottom of why Rapport did not protect keystrokes against Spector, and we’re still in the process of working that out with each other.

According to log reports Trusteer had us give them, they claimed that Rapport’s anti-keylogging mechanism was disabled. What is disheartening is that we were never warned of this via their product, and visiting websites that were allegedly protected gave no indication otherwise.

Trusteer gave us instructions for further testing.However, so far, following Trusteer’s instructions, and ensuring that Rapport’s settings were correct, Rapport still has not protected our keystrokes that we have typed into websites that were allegedly protected by Rapport, against a commercially available keylogging software.

We’ll do what we can to help Trusteer make their product better, but our confidence is shaken in that particular product.

As we stated in earlier postings, we’re not endorsing either product as being bullet proof, in fact we’re not endorsing either product at all, and we don’t think that either software makers themselves claim to be bullet proof.

Most of the keylogging we as computer users want to avoid today is done with malware (virus/spyware/rootkits/et cetera) that is not commercially available, and there’s no way for ICE to test against those.

Our conclusion is that if Rapport does not protect against commercially available keylogging software, then it may not do very well against nefariously available keyloggers that are included with malware infections.

So far, we’re liking KeyScrambler better.

We’ll keep everyone up to date as things progress….

NPR news reported that an alleged Russian Spam kingpin, Oleg Nikolaenko, was arrested during a visit in Las Vegas last month.

Authorities say he was responsible for one third of the worlds Spam, about 10 billion + Spam messages a day.

There have been a small handful of spammers  that have been made examples of over the past years, some have been sentenced to pretty serious prison time. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.

However, like any other extremely profitable criminal enterprise, there are countless more in line waiting to take place of “the kingpin”. So, don’t expect a real decrease in the amount of spam you receive for that very reason.

Here at ICE, we’re blocking 20,000+ spam messages a day and counting for our ProSpam customers. We’ve blocked 3.5 million spam messages and almost 6,000 email borne viruses since mid-May. You too can benefit from our hard work! So contact us today and find out how.