backup | Small Business Tech Tips

Just because it’s still functional doesn’t mean it’s the ideal solution. Right? [Photo credit: Sunstarfire, on Wikimedia Commons.]

Technology is ever-evolving. In a blink of an eye, what was the latest and greatest is now unsupported and obsolete. Do you know anyone who uses a cell phone older than 3 or 4 years? Have you seen one recently and thought, “A flip phone, I can’t believe they still have one of those!” Or, “That old iPhone is too slow to do what I need to do.” The first iPad came out only 5 years ago, but tablets have become mainstream in that brief time. Now everyone not only seems to have one, but they’re on their second or third. It’s easy to recognize the benefits of improved/better/faster/safer machines.

In fact, you probably apply that same thought process to your Mac, PC, or server for your business.

You know that moment when you drop your phone in water? Or when your hard drive fails in your computer? The first thing that probably comes to mind is, “Shoot! I hope I can recover my pictures, contacts, documents, (etc.)! I don’t know what I will do if I’ve lost those.” You quickly realize that it doesn’t matter that you had the latest and greatest. If your data isn’t backed up properly, you now have bigger concerns than shelling out some money for replacement or hassling with a warranty repair. Data loss can be a huge inconvenience to your personal life.

But it can cripple your business.

Backup solutions, like every other technology, are also ever-evolving. What you bought back when it was considered cutting edge may have now fallen behind times. There may be new solutions out there that better fit your business. It’s a good idea to evaluate your backup plan as often as you do your smart phone or computer. Of the many options out there, it’s important to strike a balance between cost, features, and your business’s current needs.

For instance, one of our vendors, Datto, has a line of products called TDPs (total data protection) with scalable solutions that not only provide local backups every 15 minutes, for speedy recovery, but also sync offsite for disaster recovery situation, like a building fire, so your data is still safe. Another solution is the Datto NAS, in the event that you don’t have a server but need a central and reliable place to store files. (Think dedicated file server, plugged into your network, without the big cost.) The NAS, like its TDP brethren, also backs-up automatically offsite.

Everon monitors all of the backup devices we offer, 24/7. If a problem arises, we quickly address the issue to ensure your data remains protected. Monthly plans start at only $169, hardware included. Contact us today if you would like to discuss finding the right backup solution for your business! 888-244-1748 or [email protected]. We’re here for you.

What You Might Want to Think About Before Installing Yosemite

Standard

Yosemite, the new Mac OS that replaced Mavericks this year, was released to much fanfare. And for the most part it has been a very solid operating system. You can install this OS for free from Apple’s AppStore (for anyone running Snow Leopard or later), so what’s not to love?

For me, I was very excited about Yosemite, and even wrote a blog post about its release. However, after a few months, I have decided not to install Yosemite for a few reasons (and by the way, these reasons should be taken into consideration, even if you have a Windows PC and are thinking about upgrading your OS).

The biggest reason for me is the functionality of applications. Many applications I use have not been written to work for Yosemite at the moment — and if you have critical applications, you should NOT go to a new OS until you have tested all of your applications.
Bugs. Every OS starts off with a few bugs, and while they quickly figure out the kinks, I am not interested in going through the motions until these are worked out. I would prefer to give the OS a few months to let others work through those until I am on-board.

There are a few other reasons, such as you own an old Mac that might not be able to handle Yosemite, or you don’t know your Apple ID username or password, but the two reasons above are the biggest reasons I have chosen not to move to Yosemite… yet.

I suppose a third reason could be that I am lazy. Because there are options, so I could move forward…, but I have yet to act on them.

When you decide to move to a new OS, you MUST make a backup of your machine. There are many instances where the OS installation will go bad, leaving you with a corrupt OS. If you don’t have a backup of your system, you are stuck. I also ensure I have a backup to which I can restore my old OS, in case something goes wrong (such as Yosemite not being able to open my apps).

You actually have a built in tool for handling backups, called Time Machine. Taking a backup with Time Machine is easy. Launch Time Machine from Spotlight in the upper right hand corner, and point to the backup disk you would like to take the backup to. I do this manually and connect an external drive to my Mac in order to take a proper backup.

Once you have a successful backup, you can actually restore your OS, using that backup. To do that, you need to boot into the OS X Recovery system. When booting your Mac, hold down command+R until the Apple logo appears.

One of the options should be ‘Restore from Time Machine Backup.‘ You can then choose that, and the location of the backup you just took, and restore your system. It is as simple as that.

Doing this should give you the peace of mind that if you need to go back to Mavericks, you have the ability to do so. You also have some other options out there for creating backups and restores, and I discussed one of these options in another blog recently as well. Carbon Copy Cloner gives you a great user interface and easy-to-use tools for doing the exact same thing as Apple’s Time Machine.

With options such as these, you don’t have an excuse not to try out Yosemite (unless you are lazy, like me). I will get around to it eventually, and when I do, I promise to write a full review! In the meantime, remember: if you need help either backing up or restoring your systems for your business, we are always here for you, 24/7, at Everon: 888-244-1748.

October 7, 2014 Everon TechTips

Mac Tips for Techs: Carbon Copy Cloner

Standard

As I’ve been getting into my blog-writing career here with Everon, I have been writing a lot of posts about Macs. My love of Macs started before I got into IT. Now that I am in IT I realize that, although I know a lot about the Windows OS, I am not as familiar with Macs, despite owning a few. In all reality, anything you do with a PC can be done on a Mac. (And there are many really cool tools that help you achieve your goals.)

In previous blogs, I have discussed a great cleanup tool called Onyx. I also discussed using the Network Utility tool for a Mac. In my latest blog, I want to discuss a tool that, before we were aware of the tool, we had tried for DAYS to get this working. This tool took our days of work and finished the job in 30 minutes. (I know: anyone who is more Mac-savvy probably could get the job done quicker, but for a Windows engineer, this was a tough task). The tool is called Carbon Copy Cloner.

Carbon Copy Cloner effectively and easily clones a drive in its entirety, so you can put a new drive in and change out hard drives. This is extremely important for many reasons. First off, if your drive is showing SMART errors, and you know the drive might fail soon (which you can find out by using Onyx), you will want to get a new drive in there ASAP. Also, in our case, the client wanted to go from a 240 GB drive to 1 TB in order to increase his disk space. I would also recommend using this if you want to use a solid state drive, as that is becoming the go-to for fast, reliable hard drives.

You can purchase a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner here: https://bombich.com/. However, you can also demo a 30-day trial, which works great for cloning one drive onto another. When starting up CCC, you simply choose your source drive and destination drive (also really great for complete backups), and allow it to copy.

Once done, if you were copying your bootable drive, you could then put the new drive in and boot off of it. If you are using it for backup, you could then mount the image and grab whatever you need. It is literally a one-for-one copy of your drive.

This product has a ton of other features, but I am not going to get into the details about those, as you can go to the site and review yourself. However this is my go-to every single time now for closing and replacing hard drives for a Mac. I would strongly urge you to review this product as well.

Up next for my Mac Tips for Techs: NetSpot. Your go-to tool for reviewing wireless networks.

August 12, 2014 Everon TechTips

The Shocking Cost of Data Loss

Standard

The cost of data loss

Think about these facts revealed in our new infographic:

A hard drive in the US dies every 15 seconds
SMBs experience an average of 6 outages a year
70% of SMBs experiencing a data loss shut down within 2 years

All true. And a little bit scary considering that we rely on computer systems to perform vital business functions and to store years and years of customer and financial data. Do you think your business could survive a data loss? Check out our infographic to understand what that could mean to your business.

When it comes to protecting your data and your technology, we can help. Interested in learning how? Register for a free backup assessment at: http://www.everonit.com/data-loss-infographic/

January 31, 2013 Everon TechTips

How To Transfer iPhone Contacts To Another Phone

Standard

A common issue many smart phone users is transferring their contacts between phones. Yesterday my friend got a new Android phone and after inserting the sim card from iPhone I noticed he has no contacts. It seems all his contacts are kept on his iPhone memory and not on the sim.

I’ve seen it talked about on a number of forums and it doesn’t appear that there is a clear cut method of dealing with this. The most common solution I found involved jailbreaking the phone- something I am not comfortable doing for a variety of reasons.

Finally, after a bit of research I was able to find a solution by creating a vCard. Here it is:

Install MCBackup from App Store (FREE)
Select Backup (it will take a while if you have hundreds of contacts)
Once the backup file is done it will ask you to send it as email attachment to yourself
Download the .vcf file from your email to your computer
Connect your new phone to computer and upload the .vcf file into the root of your phone
Safely unplug your new phone
On HTC go to People app / Menu / Manage contacts / Import/Export contacts / Import from phone storage

Note: After I selected Import from phone storage I received an error – ‘failed to parse vcard for unexpected reason invalid line xx’. If you receive the same, open the .vcf file with Wordpad search for whatever contact is displayed and correct the error. You can look at a similar contact in the code and replicate the same format and code around your corrected contact. E.g. my broken contact was going on 2 lines. Once I removed the ‘enter’, I copied the file again to HTC and then I selected Import again from phone storage. It worked like a charm. Now I have all 251 contacts on my new phone.