about 2 years ago - 8 comments
Hello Boys and Girls, Commodore 64 here to bring you another horror story from binary-land. Lord knows I’ve been through hell and back with computers. Overheating CPUs, which were fixed by the cold of the winter outside my apt; crashing hard drives which were fixed or accessed by various means; faulty power supplies, which had…
about 2 years ago - 8 comments
I previously wrote an AskTheAdmin article about a tool I created called SaveMyData. This tool uses several utilities to export your important data (Passwords, Serial numbers etc..) to text files. Saving you the tedious time it takes to do this stuff manually. Well AtA… I finally made SaveMyData2.0 !! It adds some cool new features:…
about 2 years ago - 10 comments
MJ writes to us that her machine runs updates around lunch time and she keeps getting the prompt do you want to restart now? Not only is it annoying – sometimes she clicks yes by accident and her whole world comes crashing down. (See the fix for this at the bottom of the post –…
about 3 years ago - No comments
Almost 3 weeks in to the New Year and the Admin needs some rest – maybe a day off? Yeah right we have even more emails today and I am studying for my 2008 Microsoft Certs! This has been a big year for the AtA gang – stay tuned for more of our geeky flavored…
about 3 years ago - 9 comments
A reader from Idaho was seriously freaked out after a late night at the computer and sent us a picture of their task manager in a strange state. They asked for their identity to be with held so here is a screen-shot of a random person’s task manager in a similar mode. Have you seen…
about 3 years ago - 20 comments
Jodi writes in: I wasn’t sure who I should contact about this, so i am sending this to you. As of late, word attachments coming from my friend on a Windows XP Machine appear as “winmail.dat” files. When I try to open these, the text runs about 150pp long, (it’s a 4page doc) and the…
about 3 years ago - 14 comments
We got this message from Fred early in the AM. I guess its great for him that we don’t sleep past 7AM anymore! I am using Outlook 2007. When I get email the pictures show as Red boxes with “X”’s in them. I used to be able to right click on the boxes and download…
about 3 years ago - 12 comments
Hello AtA! You read that title correctly, paper can be used as a form of backup media. I am not talking about printing out your documents and filing them away in some nondescript binder to gather dust, no this one is a little more complicated than that. I first want to point out that I…
about 3 years ago - 5 comments
Good Morning, I just saw the link to ask you a question and here is mine. Admin do you know of a way I can configure Vista to let me know if a specific error or event happens while I am AFK? I hear Vista can hit me on my Blackberry when an event occurs…
about 3 years ago - 7 comments
So I got a frantic phone call yesterday from a buddy of mine who lost his PST file due to a crashed hard drive. The thing is this guy normally backs up EVERYTHING! I was shocked he didn’t have another copy ready to go. When I asked him why he didn’t back up his PST…
about 4 years ago
At home I have a 180GB external drive that everything gets put on.
At the office we use an LTO3 drive.
Again, smaller office/data center than most of you guys I am sure, but the LTO3 does the trick….for now.
We are also using Backup Exec. We used to be an Arcserve shop..but that app was buggy, slow and prone to fail during backup and ever restores.
about 4 years ago
We use LTO3 Auto loader like in the picture for the office using brightstore 11.5 used to be arcserve. It is much better now admin.
At home i use the windows backup program which i think is veritas rebranded. makes one file with all in it. good indeed.
about 4 years ago
For the home user or small office admin, I recommend getting yourself a network attached storage device to place your backups, or at the very least an external hard drive.
Now that you have a place off the server/desktop computer/ laptop whatever, you can either use the built in NT backup located in Start > programs > Accessories> System Tools> backup and follow the wizard, or you can get a third party commercial product. I personally am all about free stuff, so I like the free Comodo Backup Software solution.
about 4 years ago
Enterprise wise I use LTO3 Libraries to manage our backups we also use like NinjaAdmin Brightstore 11.5. We have been with Arcserve since back in the day. We have always like CA and after you learn its quarks you can feel right at home with it.
For home users I agree with Slothman get an external drive or a second harddrive – unless you dont have huge files then you could use an image program.
Image programs take snapshots of your machine and lets you save the image to dvd or other media like a usb drive. You can then restore the image. Programs we like that do this – Acronis and Ghost.
Just remember if your backup is on the same drive as your data ITS NOT A DAMN BACKUP!!!!!
Thats like saying I wrote down all my expensive items serial numbers and I store them with the items.
Its Friday!!!!!!
TheHappyAdmin
about 4 years ago
To add to Karl’s comment about imaging programs like Acronis and Ghost, there is also a free imaging solution that comes with the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows, but it can also be downloaded and installed on your computer by itself. It is called Drive Image XML. The only problem with installing it on your computer is that it will not create deployable images, for that you need The Ultimate Boot CD version.