Disaster Recovery Posts

Disaster recovery is the plan set in place by an organization, to recover speedily after some disaster occurred. Photo by wili_hybrid.

Although the term could refer to recovery of any kind of disaster, in industry terms this specifically relates to the recovery of technological structures and typically is the responsibility of the IT department to prepare, maintain and implement during times of a disaster.

The disaster recovery plan is merely a subset of a much larger process, which is known as business continuity planning. The business continuity plan would include planning for aspects that does not relate to IT, such as personnel, crisis communication and facilities. Specialized emergency planning, such as a pandemic preparedness plan, would typically be crafted only afterwards, to support the overall business continuity plan.

What does it consist of?

The disaster recovery plan consists of procedures, policies and various processes and system which is all aimed to promote a prompt recovery with minimal operational impact in time of a crisis or emergency at some time.

It should include a proper plan for resuming applications, hardware, data, networks, communications and any other essential IT infrastructure.

Why is it important?

As we are living in the information age, information technology is probably considered the most critical function within an organization. Loss of critical data, or leaking out of such data, could result in organization closing shop within a short period of time. A company that struggles to get back on its feet after a disaster is also likely to loose its clients soon to competitors who were better prepared. Continue Reading »
Is your organization’s IT Disaster Recovery Plan in place?

How often do you backup the important files in your computer? It could be family photos, your working documents, or even your mp3 files. Image by Kunstee.

Sometimes, I realize that I have way too many important files in my computer, especially on my desktop. It just feels like everything on my computer is important, so it makes backing up my files to an external drive or online storage very troublesome.

If you have the same feeling as I do, then I guess we all need a way to backup our entire computer without having to selectively select the files to copy to an external drive.

One way is to utilize this neat little utility called Disk2vhd which allows you to create a Virtual PC image of your current computer. This way, whatever is on your machine right now goes right into the Virtual PC image (vhd format) so you can safely store it in an external hard disk. Continue Reading »
How to backup your entire computer into a Virtual PC

As we’ve seen with the recent UBS/IRS case, even the Federal Government isn’t immune to the costs and complications associated with legal discovery requests. As your company continues to grow, so too will the chances of facing litigation. That’s why it’s now more important than ever to factor legal compliance into your future IT development plans. Photo by BrentDPayne.

When it comes to information compliance, your email systems are usually the best place to start since emails are now considered “official business documents” by most courts. The email archive itself should include:

• Search facility
• Rigorous security
• Access controls

Disaster recovery and business continuance should be addressed using redundant storage with at least one copy stored off-site.

The archives may become quite large over time, especially with sizeable attachments included. Although this can be mitigated to some degree with processes such as deduplication.

When all of this is taken into account, maintaining an email archive for a growing enterprise can quickly become overwhelming.

There are arguments on both sides for whether email archives should be a strictly in-house function, or whether a “cloud-based” third-party service would be more appropriate. Hosted email archiving services are becoming more commonplace, and so the question will inevitably come up. There is no easy answer as to which one is best, and there are points you may want to consider before making a decision. Continue Reading »
Email Archives: In-House or in the Cloud?

A couple of days ago, a colleague of mine told me about her notebook behaving strangely from time to time.

When I asked her to provide a few more details about what she meant by behaving strangely, she said: Image by Jeff Kubina

• The notebook seems to hang once a while.
• Restarting the notebook occasionally shows a blue screen and the error messages pointing to hardware failures. However, restarting it a couple more times, the problem goes away by itself.
• There are some clicking sound from inside the notebook. I would assume it’s from the hard disk.

My immediate advice to her would be to backup her important files asap.

She told me, yea.. ok… she’ll do it when she’s really free. For now, it still works and the problem is intermittent. It does not happen every single time! I told her, well it’s up to you. You have been warned! Continue Reading »
Clicking sound from hard disk – Is there a solution?