|
|
 By Kenneth Chia on March 23rd, 2011 We all know the important concept of having local or onsite backup. Files get deleted accidentally, or hardware in a workstation or server fails, and precious data critical to businesses gets damaged or vanishes along with such mishaps. The ability is restore lost data from nearby media such as a backup hard drive is a potent one which saves businesses time and time again.
However, there is a critical vulnerability in relying solely on onsite backup – it runs under the presumption that the local area is safe from harm. What happens to your data in the event of a local disaster, be it man-made (war, terrorism, sabotage) or natural (earthquakes, fire, tornados, etc.)?
This is where off-site backup becomes an important consideration, the goal of which is placing some or all of your backup data elsewhere out of harm’s way.
The ideal off-site backup solution should have the following characteristics:
- It must be physically secure. Access should be guarded under lock and key, with a security guard verifying and controlling access to trusted technicians.
- It must have sufficient distance away from the original site. Having the offsite backup in another room down the hall will do you no good if a fire destroys the whole building. Consider having the off-site backup stored in another building, in another part of town, state, or even another country.
- It must be in a naturally safe zone. A site survey should determine nearby risks (near a faultline? Tornado or earthquake zone? etc…) and while considering the offsite backup placement, these areas should be avoided.
- It must be verifiable and accessible. Periodic testing of backup restores is needed, to ensure that the system works and your backup data is preserved and can be reached quickly to recover when something happens to your main backup location.
Offsite backup can be as simple as backing up data to an external hard drive and placing in a safe deposit box in some bank in another part of town, or can be as sophisticated as streaming backup data over a secure tunnel within the internet to a bank of servers in some underground bunker on the other side of the country.
We live in unpredictable times. We read in the papers and on the net about some disaster striking someplace in the world everyday, and tend to think “this cannot happen here”… but it might. Having both an onsite and an off-site backup solution in place will help ensure the survivability of your data when the unthinkable happens!
 By Alex Goldman on January 11th, 2010 Last week, Slate’s technology columnist Farhad Manjoo posted an interesting article about Google’s Android phone operating system vs. the iPhone. While the Google phone (and the brand new Nexus One) have been met with mixed reviews and a lukewarm response from the stock market (as well as a lawsuit from the estate of science fiction author Philip K. Dick), Manjoo believes that the Android’s open-source, cross-provider reach could put a real dent in the iPhone’s marketshare.
Continue reading The Mobile Phone Wars of 2010
By Alex Goldman on December 21st, 2009 Google has become so synonymous with the internet that “Googling” has become a catch-all term for doing internet searches. In a little over a decade, Google has gone from being the brain child of two Stanford graduates to being the deliverers of internet data, shaping the way we interact with information online through sophisticated searching tools, indexing projects and applications. According to this article in the Daily Telegraph, Google is once again poised to revolutionize the way we receive information by developing software that will translate non-English webpages and include them in user search results. And that’s just the beginning.
Continue reading The Unstoppable Googleplex
By Alex Goldman on December 17th, 2009  The iPhone, which can currently only be used with AT&T’s wireless data plan, has been a monolithic success. Racking up sales of over 4 million units per quarter, it’s the first handheld that’s taken a real bite out of Blackberry’s previously dominant market share. And as a device it’s not hard to love. It’s intuitive, easy to use, attractive, it can be customized with thousands of applications, and has all the features of a miniature computer. It is a nearly perfect phone except for one glaring complaint – AT&T’s voice and data reception are consistently ranked the lowest among all providers. But is it as bad as its reputation would suggest?
Continue reading AT&T and the iPhone – The Best Worst Cell Provider?
By Kenneth Chia on December 15th, 2009 Netbooks are low-cost, ultra portable computers that have recently become the hottest trend on the hardware computing market. They are essentially really tiny laptops, or as the industry likes to call them, “sub-notebooks”, which you can take almost anywhere.
Continue reading What is a NetBook?
 By Ashawn Knight on November 20th, 2009 Burning CDs and DVDs used to be available on only the most expensive machines. Nowadays they’re pretty much standard. This article will give you simple instructions on how to burn a CD or DVD on your computer.
Continue reading CD and DVD Burning 101
 By Mike Viola on November 19th, 2009 According to a website called www.domaintools.com which runs metrics on internet usage, over 50,000 new .com domains have been added to the internet in the past 24 hours. The web is now an essential tool for leveraging information, from personal interests to email to business. Still, for all of the websites that we visit every day, most of us have little idea of exactly what it takes to create one and keep it online. This is the story of what happens to a website before all of the content creation; this is about how to make content accessible to the web.
Continue reading The Anatomy of a Website
By Mike Viola on November 11th, 2009 For many of us, 9 to 5 is the most productive portion of the day, not necessarily because we don’t desire to get work done outside of the office, but because the logistics of doing so are difficult to manage. Fortunately, new technologies have made it much easier to bring the office with you anywhere on the planet (with an internet connection). Today we focus on the first step in the process: the Virtual Private Network.
Continue reading Virtual Private Networks: Paving the Way to the Global Office
 By Tony Simoes on November 4th, 2009 It is sometimes referred to as “The Monitor”, sometimes as “The Display”, and on occasion (more often than you think) “The Computer”, the computer monitor is the most recognized component of the modern day computer. In recent years there have been dramatic improvements in the manufacturing process of LCD screens that has driven the prices of them way down. Even though LCD screens are the default display for the modern computer, there are still some niche markets where the CRT still holds some ground. Why has the LCD taken over? Let’s find out.
Continue reading The Great Monitor Question: CRT or LCD?
By Kenneth Chia on September 30th, 2009 Today e-mail is key to communication, and has become a essential and powerful business tool. Like any powerful tool, it can be used and abused. We’ll look at some tips and tricks to help you get the most from your company e-mail.
Continue reading Best Practices for Your Business E-mail
|
about Cyber City was founded in 1996 with the vision to provide the small business sector with the best IT solutions and services possible. >>read more
|
