News

• International Travel and Your Laptop

  Shanta Hasan asked me for advice about traveling internationally with a laptop.

• Dell buys AppAssure for software backup

  Dell said Friday it has purchased backup software vendor AppAssure, in the first of an expected run of acquisitions following Dell's appointment of former CA CEO John Swainson as head of a new software division.

• Altaro ships Hyper-V backup solution for SMBs

  Altaro Software has started shipping Hyper-V Backup, a product designed to make it easier for small and medium-size companies to protect the data on their virtual servers.

• Seagate offers data recovery with hard drive purchase

  Hard drive crashes are a nightmare for computer users for many reasons. Not only can data held dear to one's heart be lost, but trying to recover it can cost an arm and a leg, if not more. Hard drive maker Seagate attempts to address both those problems with the release today of its GoFlex Turbo drive with SafetyNet data recovery services.

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  NBN reliability: Help guide first step for battery backup

  The roll out of the National Broadband Network is set to revolutionise the way Australians communicate, but it has raised questions about the reliability of the network compared with existing copper-based telephone systems, especially among non-technical people.

• The good, bad & ugly of Dropbox authentication error

  Online storage service Dropbox made an embarrassing error Monday, turning off password authentication for millions of users.

• How to keep local access to data during Cloud outages

  The Amazon cloud services outage that knocked out several popular Websites last week raised questions about the reliability of the cloud, but the general consensus is that it works if you plan for failure. Like any good business plan, a good cloud plan should include provisions for failure, including plans B and C, and plenty of backups.

• What your business can learn from Amazon Cloud outage

  The servers are back up and users can once again check in on Foursquare and ask questions on Quora, but the legacy of last week's Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) outage will live on and provide important lessons for businesses as they look to cloud computing for their IT future.

• Leaving your job? Take your data with you

  Nothing lasts forever, and in the 21st century, most people's employment is anything but guaranteed. What should have some permanence, however, is our digital footprint -- the body of data that constitutes the true center of our professional lives. In this article, I'll explain how to protect the integrity of your most valuable business data as you make the transition from one job to another, or from job to jobless.

• Backup disasters: How you can avoid them

  As poet Robert Burns famously put it, the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley, that is, they often go awry. Im thinking of those lines as I struggle to clean up a backup and subsequent hard drive replacement that went seriously wrong.

• Google Gmail snafu lesson: Backup, backup, backup

  Gmail is hard at work restoring service to about 40,000 Gmail users after a software bug deleted their e-mail messages, folders, labels and filters. So, while things are looking good for those users affected by the bug, this episode proves, once again, that while Web-based services may be robust, you still have to take responsibility for your own data.

• Using more than one backup program

  Ata Amiri asked if using two separate backup program will interfere with incremental backups.

• Building a better business backup system

  As with buying insurance or taking vitamins, committing to data backup is a hard sell. Everyone knows that storing records safely in more than one place protects the health of a business, but many companies fail to establish backup systems that will keep them running if disaster strikes.

• Oracle offers file management package for cloud

  Hoping to service the growing market for cloud computing systems, Oracle has packaged two file management software programs into a single integrated offering, called the Oracle Cloud File System, the company announced Monday.

• Microsoft delivers enterprise backup tool

  Microsoft's flagship backup and archiving software, Data Protection Manager, has come a long way since we first tested it in 2005.