How Carbonite Works?

• Carbonite will install an application in your computer that runs quietly in the background. The computer user need not learn anything about this application. It regularly checks for the files that have been edited and need to be backed up. 
• When your computer goes idle then Carbonite activates and starts backing up all the necessary files that were marked for online backup. If you start using your computer then it goes to sleep mode so that your Internet connection speed isn’t decreased.
• All files are encrypted and hence only the real owner can see the files.
• Whenever you need to use the backed up files (most likely when your hard disk crashes) then you need to visit Carbonite website and within minutes you will start restoring your data.

All good services come at a price and so does the online backup service of Carbonite. You will have to pay $54.95 for a year of subscription. I guess that isn’t much when it come to saving GBs of your local data online?

Lastly, if you cannot afford such online backup services then you must optimize your hard disk for better performance and for longer life.

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To overcome such and many other problems related with installing drivers to Windows when you do not have the drivers CD here I present a solution: DriverMax.

You can use this FREE utility to backup all your drivers or choose to store some particular driver in a folder so as to later install it in the newly installed system.

After installation you will first see the window saying 30 days left to evaluate this program. Don’t worry dude, you can get a free activation key from there website so as to use the app for the rest of your life.

[click on the images to enlarge them]

Continue and you will see the first necessary screen which will mark the beginning of the ‘end of your driver problems’. Select “Export Drivers” option.

The very expected warning message will appear next which eases your heartbeat. The app will just copy your required drivers to a folder and will make no changes to your settings.

Click continue and after some processing the software will list the complete list of available drivers in your system. Select all the drivers if you want to backup your drivers or else select the particular drivers which you wish to transport to other machines.

The nifty app will ask for the folder where you wish to store all the drivers and the necessary process to backup your required drivers starts.

Done! The necessary backup process must have taken hardly few minutes and there you go all your required drivers backed up at one place.

While installing these drivers to another system choose Import drivers and give the path to the folder which contains the necessary drivers.

With these easy steps you can easily backup your drivers and to add to this you can also check for any driver updates, in case your new system where you imported the drivers does not supports the old drivers. Who knows!

[Download DriverMax Here And Invent Driver Solutions]

© CompuWorld - because The Genius Inside You Is Still Sleeping.

I got the chance to get the feel of a real DC when I visited the DC of IITk (Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur) while undergoing my course for networking at the campus. The IITk DC servers around 6500 computers and has been doing so continuously for last 25 years without any power cuts! That visit made me feel how important a DC could be for an organization and hence pinched me to ponder into the world of data centers.

So get ready to read a really lengthy article on the challenges which an organization faces while building and maintaining a DC. Fasten your seat belts as this is going to be really lengthy and in no sense intriguing if you are not interested.

Let us dive into different challenges and there expected solutions one by one.

Power Availability
Power is the key concern for any DC. No company can afford even a single second of downtime of there DC power as this might well result in restarting of many machines and processes. No one would want that hmm?

Proper UPS and indigenous power generation units need to be deployed. Considering the example of IIT’s DC, they have continuous power supply from the government plus high power UPSs backing up.

Power supply should be designed in a manner that if in future the DC is upgraded or more equipment is added than proper power is easily available for the same.

Crash Recovery Issues
What if even a small piece of your hardware fails. It is bound to leave back some downtime. This will ofcourse be a hurdle in your work.

So you should be ready with your spare hardware so as to avoid downtime. That makes it clear that you always need to have extra piece of same hardware. Same is the requirement in case of complete DC crash. If you are a large organization and cannot afford a single second of downtime than you need to have redundancy in your DC.

Quoting a live example, few months back Indian ISP ‘BSNL’ faced a crash in there Bangalore DC in India itself and the result was no internet for its customers for one full day. They had no redundant DC to take over!

Readiness for Future

Future planning should start from the day you start building your DC. New technologies and scalability options should be an important part of your future planning.

Some new technologies for DC are:

• Virtualization
• DR-BCP (Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan)
• SAN
• Blade Servers
• Server Consolidation
• Biometric Security
• 10 Gig Ethernet Backbone
• KVM over IP for remote management.

Monitoring
Believe it! You must have a 24×7 monitoring staff, either in-house or outsourced partially/completely.

In-house monitoring has its own pros and cons.

Pros:

• You have your data secured
• You can easily implement your own policies
• Ofcourse money is saved.

Cons:

• In case of new technology change you need to train your staff.
• Increase your staff’s payment so that they do not leave the company.
• Constant motivation is required to retain the staff.

Peak Utilization Days
You need to understand that there will be days of peak resource utilization in your DC.

In such cases a good idea would be to terminate lower priority processes and divert the resources to application with higher priority.

Cooling
Services and other equipment generate a lot of heat in DC which affects the performance of DC plus chances of wear and tear also increase. Thus cooling is important part of DC.

Cooling requirements should be analyzed before you build a DC. For already built DC you need to deploy temperature monitoring and control equipment. Emergency cooling devices like should also be made available.

Inhouse or Outsourced?
This turns out to be the most important criteria for your DC. One should weigh the pros and cons before taking a decision.

• Consider your budget. If you can afford a in-house DC and changing technology, and if you can than outsourcing is of no use.
• Will you current DC handle your additional work load? If it’s not scalable then its better to outsource.
• Check if you have the manpower and if you can keep upgrading to new technology without shortage of manpower. It is better to outsource to professionals if you cannot retain the necessary manpower.

I would suggest a mix of both. Like I learned in my summer training for my final year engineering curriculam:

Critical applications like mail and transaction processing should be handled in-house whereas applications like help desk, website hosting, database management could be outsourced.

It would always be better to preplan your requirements and future goals and then take steps for building in-house/outsourced DC. Its better to spend some time initially for planning than to purposely create situations where your work is halted due to poor DC plans.

Please plan before you move forward else the consequences could be dangerous.

© CompuWorld - because The Genius Inside You Is Still Sleeping.

OPTIMIZATION

• Defragment your drive: This is one of the oft repeated tips, yet I impose this again – and for a good reason. Defragmentation puts together in contiguous locations various chunks of individual files scattered across the disk, so that it can be accessed faster with lesser mechanical strain to the hard disk. Use the Windows defragmentation tool or a free tool like AusLogics Defragmenter.
• Use Power Saving Options: The lesser you make your hard drive work, the longer it lasts. If you are used to leaving your PC idle while you step out, enable hard disk power off under Power Management or just Hibernate your PC which will switch power your hard disk off. However, do NOT use this option if you are going to be away for just a few minutes or you frequently take such breaks, as frequent start-stops can actually reduce the drive’s life. Use it if you are going away for a couple of hours and you do not want to switch off and on your PC.
• Avoid Tilting: Avoid Tilting or otherwise moving your PC when the PC is on.Hard drives do not take too kindly to be moved around while they are working! And, if you hear a screeching noise from your PC that coincides with the hard drive activity indicator (usually the red LED), it’s time for you to backup immediately and be prepared for new hard disk.

Recovery Of Data From Dead Hard Disk

Do you hear some screeching sound from your hard disk? Does it starts spinning, stops, spins again and then stops again? Are you NOT able to recover the lost data in your dead hard disk? Then read on to know the FBI style of data recovery from your dead hard disk:

Believe me! Try keeping the disk in “freezer” (yes true!) for about 30 minutes and then do the recovery process (transferring data to working hard disk). You could also use a long cable to transfer the data while the disk is in there in freezer. If the arms are just rubbing then the low temperature may shrink everything up just enough to clear. If the arms dumped into the platters then sorry it’s gonna be hard. So instead of buying a costly data recovery software you can first give a try to this method. Remember that this method will work until the disk is cold enough. If data to be recovered is large then I guess repeating the process of recovery and cooling would do. (go, give it a try)

This proves that you do need a backup for your backup (in case the disk was a backup disk).

© CompuWorld - because The Genius Inside You Is Still Sleeping.

When you save some data into your hard disk than it saves the data in different tracks and sectors. Like in your locality where you live. Now when you delete that data, your hard disk actually wouldn’t delete the data. It would make that “full space” available to re-write another data. And would make you feel that your data has been deleted, which is actually not the case. Now when you use some software to recover deleted data that software would make the address for that data available to your Windows. And if that was trial version, it would do the initial recovery and will ask you to buy the software. Now when you use another software for same data recovery it would do nothing as initially the memory addresses have been interrupted from initial settings.

This is where Seagate comes to the rescue with their File Recovery for Windows software. This program does the same tasks as the rest of them, which includes recovering files types such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook PSTs, databases, AutoCAD, Microsoft SQL, MPEG, AVI, MP3, and photo file formats from FAT12/16/32 and NTFS file systems. What’s the catch then? It can be downloaded for free from Seagate’s website and with it examine the hard drive in order to find out if a “successful recovery is possible”. This way, users know for sure if the information can be rescued, before actually purchasing the software.

Kevin Halladay, I.T. manager of the Sundance Ski Resort in Utah said: “I called a handful of drive recovery services and was given estimates ranging from $700 to $8,000 to restore my data with a wait of at least four days. I called Seagate Recovery Services about sending the drive in for recovery, and their client service representative suggested that Seagate’s D.I.Y. software was the ideal solution for my data loss situation. I downloaded the software and recovered all of my data, and Seagate saved me hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. The software is easy to use, very intuitive and provided a full recovery for a fraction of the cost of an in-lab solution. The product is a true bargain.”

© CompuWorld - because The Genius Inside You Is Still Sleeping.