Backup & Storage

Is your iTunes library in the Lost & Found? John O’Neill, Sr. walks you through an easy and pain-free way of transferring your old info to a new device.

The Drobo B800i iSCSI storage array is the perfect solution for SMB-level and “pro-sumer” storage as well as virtualization environments utilizing VMware. The new generation of Drobo is pushing the limits with BeyondRAID, Thunderbolt, Data-Aware SSD Tiering and so much more. Read vExpert David Davis’ review of Drobo B800i to learn more.

The disaster recovery process for an iPad is fairly easy and can be broken down into three phases. Backing up the data is part of phase 1 and is the focus of this article by IT veteran John O’Neill Sr. He will cover the remaining phases, which include wiping and restoring the device, in the next couple articles in this series.

Anyone who has relied on a hard drive or other storage device has probably lost an important file. It may be due to accidental deletion, data corruption, or merely a change of mind – “Shoot, I shouldn’t have deleted that file!”. The good news is that these files can almost always be restored. In this post, we walk you through a few simple steps to recover those lost files.

As fast as hard drive capacities grow, so does the amount of data users expect to store on them. In this post, storage expert Tom Finnis shows how to re-size existing drives in Windows, when what may have seemed like plenty of storage when you first installed a Windows VM is now not enough.

Wesley David discusses data deduplication and why all system admins should consider utilizing it. Duplicate data can lead to system inefficiencies and unnecessary costs in your system’s storage arrays. In this introductory post, Wesley covers what deduplication actually is, the different types of deduplication and helps you decide what would be the best option for you.

The following article explores the puzzling situation in which an external disk drive behaves as if it is “Read Only” but there is no indication in the Windows UI that indicates this is the case. A walk-through is provided to troubleshoot and ultimately provide a solution to this situation.

Backing up virtual machines presents different challenges than backing up physical machines. Ignoring these challenges may lead to an incomplete or even failed backup even though it may not be apparent until you try and restore the backup. This brief article goes over these important considerations and will help you make sure your VM backups are complete.

Backing up virtual machines is a little different than backing up a traditional system. The following article provides a nice walk through for backing up virtual machines on Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V using Windows Server Backup.

In this article, Daniel Petri addresses the case for user activity monitoring instead of relying only on system logs, which leave blind spots in your audit reports. Several scenarios are detailed to demonstrate how user activity monitoring can be used to augment the existing system and database logs.