Quick Byte Blog

I'm completely a DIY sort of guy. I like to figure things out by myself. You give me a book or an internet and the proper tools and I can fix just about anything, figure out how to do whatever I want. There are of course times when you shouldn't DIY and I regularly find myself facing clients and saying..."Oh, you shouldn't have done that," even though I'm kind of impressed that they tried. Unfortunately, messing with a failing computer when you are not 100% sure you have a backup is almost always a recipe for disaster.

Affordable external hard drives have made data storage and backup cheaper and simpler than ever, but like every other great technology, there's a catch.

At it's most basic, an external hard drive is not much more than a regular old laptop or desktop hard drive in a box. Add a little bit of circuitry to interface with the computer and voila! However, many of these solutions, particularly the network based models and the larger capacity models on the market at any given time,  are actually a little more complicated than that.

These models incorporates a technology called RAID (Redundant Array Of Independent Disks) to provide increased perfomance, data redundancy, or in some cases just a bigger number on the outside of the box. RAID is actually an excellent technology, but in these units it can be a disaster because they are more prone to failure. Making matters worse,  in the event of failure, data recovery can be much more difficult.

The takeaway here is that if you use external hard drives, be sure you only use a RAID device if you actually need it. In any event,  if you are using one of these drives, you still need to have another backup. Of course, this is true with any data you value, but is easily overlooked here.

Damn.....! All I can say is it's about time.

A lot of you are stopping by because  I invited you, so thanks for coming over. While we're at it thanks for letting me handle your IT for the last 11 years.  I've enjoyed myself, and I'm looking forward to being useful in the future. This web site is the first step in that direction.

Redesigning quickbyte.net was long overdue. It wasn't really critical, but it will lead to some useful innovations, for one thing better content management, which will allow me to support client's better.  I also intend to roll out a trouble ticket system which will help me keep track of your requests. Yup, we're getting pretty high faluting around here.

For those interested in the technical side of things. This site was created in Joomla CMS 1.5, using a template from Rocket Labs. The blog software, MyBlog comes from a company called ahezrul.com. The commenting software was purchased from them as well, but it breaks the template, so for the time being no comments.  2 steps forward....

That's about it. I've revised most of the articles in that section, so they are worth looking at. There's a new one that sums up my thoughts on IT planning during  these tougher times,  you should check that out.

Finally, if you see anything broken or stupid, please let me know.

Thanks as always.
Steve