A New Year With Some Familiar Old Problems
By the time we press “send” on this, January will be nearly over.
Happy New Year, anyway!
And the new year greeted us with some of the same old problems we’re used to seeing.
Outside of the “computer room,” data backup continues to be an issue, especially for that remote laptop, or the PC on a network, but storing data locally.
USB flash and portable hard drives are good for that kind of smaller backup; but it’s a mostly manual process that requires developing the “backup habit”.
If you have a PC with access to network storage, consider saving your data there (where there’s already a good automatic backup regimen in place, right?). No network? Consider an on-line service, like Carbonite, or CDS’ own “Basic Backup”.
A major local Internet provider gave us several hours of a near complete service outage. Outages are as old the services, but the length and size of this one made us think about Internet service backup for ourselves.
Some of you considering “cloud computing” are reconsidering. Having your critical programs and data in the “cloud” sounds like a great idea, until you can’t get there.
Viruses aren’t new, but another “highlight” of the new year is “malware” that’s sneakier and more dangerous than ever. As I write this, we’re reviewing a “critical” Microsoft patch for Internet Explorer. It’s possible you’ll see a bulletin from us about that before you get this.
Whether it’s help with a backup strategy, addressing Internet and software hosting strategy, problems with malware, or any other IT issue, we’re here to help in the new year and beyond.
Contact us anytime.
--Mike Weaner and
Comprehensive Data Services