May 2011 Blog Posts

The importance of off-site backups

A few weeks ago burglars broke into my house and stole, among other things, the laptop we use to store our family photographs. That laptop had years of irreplaceable photos on it's hard disk - about 30GB of them. But off-site backup and insurance turned this tragedy into a mere inconvenience. I went and bought a new laptop, run an endless sequences of windows updates, installed the JungleDisk software and clicked the restore button - and all is well again. If you don't have automatic off site backup for all your important files stop whatever you...

How to safely upgrade critical server software

IF you manage a server - any server - it's going to have all sort of software running on it (common examples are mail servers, database servers and web applications) and software has to be updated from time to time. From my experience software that is part of "Microsoft web platform" (Windows, the .net framework and IIS plugins provided by Microsoft - not including SQL server) tend to install without problems and update using windows automatic updates without serious issues - most of the time. 3rd party software obviously ranges from completely automated upgrades to almost impossible to...