Backup Anytime

If Microsoft was a bank its’ products wouldn’t crash!

Two things everyone knows.
1. Microsoft is a huge (understatement) worldwide software company.
2. World banking is in a horrifying state of flux (understatement no.2) at present.

Two things you may or may not know.
1. Microsoft has a finance division aptly if unimaginatively called Microsoft Financing.
2. They are at present in limited circumstances providing 0% financing!

Whats the catch? Here it is.
You must be a new purchaser of specific Microsoft Customer Relationship Management and Dynamics solutions. The financing period will be three years. You must take the offer some time between today (19th November 2008) and 20th March 2009. You must be credit approved. Your purchase must be a minimum of  $30,000 and a max of $1,000,000.

Katrina Braund, (Microsoft Finance dev. manager) will be better placed to give the green light to finance applicants than many major financial institutions. Indeed the financing division of Microsoft which doubled business in the past year is likely to do more so in the next twelve months despite the common near closing of books at traditional finance sources.

The Microsoft finance division (and finance divisions at other major software and software as a service providers) originally came about as a consequence of a reluctance of mainstream finance houses to finance these offerings.

Microsoft are obviously well positioned to offer finance for their own products given the considerable markup which reduces risk. This will remain welcome in the software market. Could it tempt Microsoft to expand it’s finance offerings beyond it’s own products? Not likely but always possible.

After the release of IE7 Microsoft claimed that Internet explorer updates would be more frequent and hinted that these updates could be as frequent as every six to nine months. It is not far off two years since IE7 was released in beta format and the beta of IE8 has just become available.

I downloaded it today. Much too early to form an opinion let alone report any findings but that I will do as soon as is practical.

Please know this;

Beta downloads are exactly that. You should not download them on mission critical systems regardless of the source.

Even if a beta is stable and does not cause any issues it may be incomplete so any feature report based on beta usage may not be accurate based on a final release.

Beta releases may be upgraded so a beta release tested by you today mar result in a very different experience by someone downloading tomorrow.

If you want to take a test drive (and you have nominated a system specifically for this) go to

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/default.aspx

I will report back next week on my experience.

How far you should go with regard to data protection used to be a personal choice and was based on perception and budget. In a time (not too long ago) when many very small businesses had near no backup solution and depend on the occasional internal manual data dump, larger companies took great steps to protect their data.

An example is Microsoft which has always taken a worst case scenario attitude. It is common for larger companies to suffer detrimental press coverage (and worse) as a consequence of even a minor data infringement. While Microsoft suffer from comment abuse across the web from bloggers unhappy with software or bundling, their is (considering their long held global presence) little real comment or info regarding Microsoft data outages. Their worst case scenario attitude has paid off.

So what use is this information to small business?

Given significant advances in technology boundaries and even greater cost reductions, many smaller companies are simply unaware of the level of data protection they can avail of for minimal investment relative to what significantly weaker protection would have cost in time past.

The problem here is that small business (in the absence of professional advice) commonly search for and find cheap products based on obvious price cuts rather than suitable solutions in markets they are not familiar enough with to recognise greater value.

An example would be a very small business operator who purchases a large volume hard drive in Maplin, PC world or even Aldi based on an awareness that this drive is significantly reduced in price. This information is obvious as a consequence of advertising but that does not make the purchase suitable to the problem being addressed. The likelihood is that the 500 Gig hard drive is capable of storing significantly more data then the purchaser needs. Worse still it could encourage the owner to “backup” irrelevant data thus complicating the store for index purposes and risking non compliance with data protection legislation.

All that aside, the proud owner of the new device still does not have a proper backup system. The external drive amounts to a high risk bulk store and could bring with it a false confidence which could further increase risk.

So what should our man be doing?

He should ask himself the following questions.

How much data do I need to backup?

Do I have a safe place to keep it?

Will I have the time to manage it without exception?

What type of indexing and searchability do I want to en-corporate?

How far back do I want to Be able to restore?

What (data wise) is the worst possible thing that could happen?

Armed with these questions he should approach a number of data backup specialists and seek advice followed by quotations. So far he has spent nothing and he will gain an insight in the the value available in the quality end of the market and will have been able to compare them.

He doesn’t have to go with any of them but either way he will be informed.

In summary

A big hard drive is not a backup, it is a big hard drive. If you disagree with this comment you should seek professional advice before disaster strikes. You don’t have to drop, lose or break your external drive. It will (as an absolute certainty) fail one day all on it’s own.

big boot

Well, that is somewhat tongue in cheek. I have never heard of a .pst file which prevented a systems from booting but I have over the years come accross many .pst files which were too big to be usable in a beneficial manner. Some years ago this was attributed to the user having an old version of Outlook. Some things dont change because it is the most commonly suggested solution to this day if the user does not have the absolute latest version of Outlook.

The real issue is that Outlook works well up to specifc file sizes. In earlier years there was a circ 2 gig limit on the usable Outlook pst file but later versions can work (not should or definitely will) with considerably larger files.

You can approach this issue from a number of different perspectives.

If outlook actually works but is just slow on occasion or specific tasks.

You could get a later version of outlook.  You can upgrade your RAM or get a system with a more capable processor.

If outlook wont open at all you may need to use a ulitity (Microsoft or third party) to fix the .pst file and another to crop it down to a usable level.

Again, after the immediate file issue is resolved you can upgrade outlook and your hardware.

Another option is to use another mail client. Mozilla is a common choice as it is reported as being more capable with large mail quantities.  Common issue here however are the added functionality of outlook such as callender and office features.

Other possibilities are to consider using exchange as this reduces the local system resource required on a per mail access basis.