Is your office equipment letting you down?

[twinscythe12332]

For my backup, I have set up a separate machine running windows server 2003 linked through a linksys wireless g ap. To that I have attached a few external hard drives of various sizes and makes. Then at the moment I am trying Avanquest Autosave software to run the backup in the background. Seems to be ok except its slow and with the drives gets fiddly in terms of what is going where and the software is not very user friendly. I am thinking of one big drive to make sure I have all my stuff in one place and saving once a month say and then storing that drive somewhere else.

For laptops I have tried hp, compac, toshiba and now on a second acer. I think I enjoyed the toshiba the most.

That wireless n rangemax looks sharp 15X speed and 5X range compared to G (according to the netgear site) - methinks its a present coming up.

I like your idea of using a machine as a backup. the only thing I can really suggest is that you consider putting 2 hard drives in the machine in a raid 1 (mirrored). It helps when hard drives give in. other than that, as tec suggests, there should be an offsite backup in the event of fires.


how much are you paying for toner?

[Dave A]

how much are you paying for toner?

Around the R700.00 + VAT mark per cartridge, although it's affected by the exchange rate and does fluctuate some.

And to extend the drug analogy - Every time I take on a new supplier, they start at about R500.00 + Vat and with each successive order the discount gets reduced.

[tec0]

Knowing you probably have been playing with your quality setting to try and get more out of your printer I can understand how that can be a frustration. One of my clients pay round about R6000 for her printing needs. Mostly colour printing but she needs her presentation to look as good as it possibly can be. I do not supply ink at all so I don’t know the cost prices of ink. However I think a consumer strike is in order when it comes to ink prices.

Raid is always a good thing until you have problems with your raid controller and the onboard stuff likes give way after 16 months of use. I recommend you get PCI based SATA controller expansion card and keep a second card as backup. Also number your drives and keep them in the same order. “some computers are unforgiving if you mix up the order of your drives.� I also recommend a domain controller thus all your stuff can sit on the server and people just log into it with their username and passwords.

It is old school yes but your administrative powers and backup becomes less of a nightmare. I find that domain controllers with active-directory once properly implemented is really a robust setup. “Also a bit of old school but try and have BDC running with it. “Backup- Domain Controller� You don’t have to hardwire it into the system. Keep it offline and up to date. If the PDC “Primary-Domain-Controller� goes you bring the BDC online and it will resume the role of Domain-Controller. It will also provide you with the time you need to get your server fixed and you have no down time.

The stuff is easy to setup just Google it and play with a small “workshop network� before you implement it. The reason I say this is you can Identify problems beforehand and deal with them before you implement the system.

I am enjoying this!

And I am still working on a “kickable� computer for you

[twinscythe12332]

check here I don't know if the prices are better or not, but they sure have a wide range. R55 to ship anywhere else in the country, R35 for Gauteng. so it could be an idea to buy a few extra to save on the costs.

[Marq]

Your are right - one can never have too many backups in different places.

I think my main problem is with software to guide the process. I need to have it centralised at my machine where I can go into the other machines on the network and suck out the data and send to the backup server - or run it from the backup server where it does not affect the other machines.

The speed is relative to the amount of data you need to back up - sort of like the pigeon story. So I would like to image all drives on the system - say a once off on big drive and take off site. Then during the month do an incremental story on other drive/s. End of month image the drives that are handling user data on big drive and so on.

We have discussed backup software before here where Nortons, MS backup and Second Copy were mentioned. I tried MS for a while, still not sure about Nortons. Is Second copy still an option or is there other stuff out there?

[tec0]

I take it that your system is network based. Remote Administrator is a capability of Windows XP pro and only the more Powerful Vista OS like Ultimate. With this tool you can log into the other computers and send the information to you by taking control of the system. It is easy to set-up and runs OK on a network.

Remote Administrator can work here, all you do is you share a temporary folder and log into the computers and start the copy process on the network. After you are done you just log out of the computer and log into the next. But there is a much easier way to this.

Here is a brainwave you can try. Set up a folder for each user on your server. Map the folder to their desktop and let them work from it. Give them an ID code along with the file name.

Example: file name 01 (Identify the user with the 01) and if someone edit the document let them put their number in place of the 01. So user one is 01 user two is 02. Thus the document will be saved as document01.doc by user 1 and document02.doc for user two thus you don’t get everyone working on the same document all the time! Only if they need to they can correspond with the file in question.

Now everything will be opened and saved onto the server ALL THE TIME thus you only need to back up the drive with the folders on them. “this is really primitive but it works� I know of two small companies that work this way “they don’t want to spend the money for a proper server system� It works okay but take care this can become tricky! Trust me it can become a nightmare if you lose sight of it!

[Marq]

Thanks for the input guys.

I can see I will have to take a day off and play with these ideas and processes.
It will be a day that I will take a prozac, suck on magic mushrooms, smoke a spliff and do calming meditation exercises.

[twinscythe12332]

I've just taken a quick look at the MS vista backup setup. It seems a little bit... silly, focusing on types of files rather than allowing the user to specify the FOLDERS they want to back up, but hey, that's Microsoft. Anyway here's a look at the vista backup settings.
Part one shows the files you can save in the backup, and part two is specifying the times, days, frequency of the backup. The screen before all of this allows you to specify that you wish to backup to a particular external device or network PC. Useful in your case I'd say.

As for XP, I'm thinking there will be similar options, but maybe not quite as pretty a process. I'll take a look at it once I'm homeward.

[IanF]

Here is my take on toner costs. The higher the price of the printer the lower the cost of the toner. I print to my copiers all day and get charged a "click" charge for each print which includes the toner and the service. I have just had the tech for my colour machine in here for 2 days to get the machine working properly this hasn't cost me any more.
So if you do a reasonable amount of printing get a copier you can print to, just make sure that the company has a good reputation for service. If you get a mono machine insist that the used toner is not recirculated, this recycles a lot of paper dust giving you grey prints. Don't lease from the copier company and if you lease, do it through your bank the maximum term should be 3 years. Also pay a bit extra for scan back facilities, for me this is a nice little profit centre.
What I have done for USB ports is to get the USB extension cords so the USB port is right next to the keyboard, worth the few bucks for the convenience.

[tec0]

I dislike USB hubs. The reason is power. Think about this everything you connect to the USB hub takes an amount of power. Now all that power comes from the computer’s USB port because most USB hubs don’t have their own power-supply! Now I promise you your port on your computer will make trouble within 12 months if the use is constant. The alternative is a USB expansion card; use this with your USB hub. The reason is simple once the card becomes faulty you can replace it.