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Showing posts from September, 2009

Backup Best Practices

If the data on your server was lost, what would you do? At some point, everyone will lose data. It is often at this point you will realise how good your backup strategy is. There are several data loss scenarios to consider... Hardware Failure Hardware is becoming more and more resilient, but it will never be 100% perfect. Although better quality components cost more and reduce the risk of failure, failure can never be completely eliminated. Backing up your data will allow you to be prepared when it does happen. A common misconception is that backups are not required when a server has mirrored disks or RAID. This is not the case! User Error Users can often delete or overwrite important files accidentally. Sometimes they realise this immediately, other times the error is not detected until much later when the file is next needed. Having a backup which enables you to retrieve files from a long time ago will help in this situation. Fire/Theft/Flooding The end result of these can be ...

Quad Online Backup - First Sale!

Quad is proud to announce the first sale of its online backup solution, QuadBackup . Before its official launch, our good customer, Arches Housing Ltd, had been helping us to trial the software. They had been looking for a reliable way of storing their backup off site , instead of the weekly tape drop-off at Quad by courier. When QuadBackup was in its final phases of testing, we set it up at Arches to give them an idea of how it would work. We had been monitoring the testing, and all had been going very well. Whilst finalising how to launch the product, we received a call asking to restore a folder which had been accidentally deleted some time ago. As it happened, the oldest tape (two weeks) was offsite at Quad, so we restored the folder from it which had around 150Mb of data in it. Using QuadBackup, however, we restored over 750Mb of data as the history went back for several months. Needless to say, Arches were delighted at this and have snapped-up the QuadBackup.

Clearing the Visual Studio Web Cache

Working with Visual Studio 2008 on websites with other developers, I was continually annoyed by the message :- Confirm Save To Web Server A more recent version of the file [filename] has been saved to the Web server by [username] on [DateTime] Do you want to replace the server file with your local file? Yes/No I didn't want to replace the server file with my local file. In fact, I wanted to update my local file with the one from the server if someone else had changed it! This situation got steadily more annoying as more files were changed on the site, meaning that it took many clicks of "no" (would be nice to have had "no to all") just to exit Visual Studio (2008). This message appeared whether or not I had changed a file. Extensive searching on the internet, within help files and looking at options did not reveal anything which helped me. Finally, I pieced together the following which worked for me, and hopefully will work for you. It appears...

Dore House Industrial Estate - New Blog

Quad has started a blog specifically for Dore House Industrial Estate. View it here.