Backup & Storage

Bruce Mackenzie-Low discusses the major storage architectures that can be used in a Windows environment. This article provides an overview of Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS).

Bruce Mackenzie-Low covers free Windows tools for storage performance monitoring, including Task Manager and Perfmon. These tools gather and display performance metrics to help identify any I/O bottlenecks or saturation. Stay tuned for future articles on using other free tools such as PAL and xPerf, to analyze storage performance data.

One of the most frustrating situations presented to computer users is the instance when their hard drive fails. They try to access their files and they might even purchase a SATA or IDE to USB attachment to try and get their files off onto another computer. Unfortunately, in many instances, the files are gone and…

This month’s topic comes as a result of a question sent to our feedback email box recently: “Data is increasing and budgets are shrinking but reliable backups are more important than ever. As an SMB, what should I be looking for?” Today’s backup systems need to be fast, reliable, affordable and designed to easily handle…

This tutorial shows you how to use free hard drive partition tools and utilities. Safely divide your HD into several paritions for the installation of an alternate operating system or to separate data from the OS itself. Ten different free tools are featured.

How can I defrag my Hard Disk by right clicking it? You can tweak your Explorer to have a nice right-click add-on: Download this nifty VB SCRIPT (1kb) or the new and improved EXE (zipped, 10kb) and run it. You will then be able to defrag any HD by right clicking it. This script was…

File Servers Learning Labs A review of Train Signal’s Windows 2000/2003 File Servers Video Lab Training – Product Details. See more details at Train Signal’s website. I start at the beginning of Lab 2 with the Concepts video. Here Scott delves into RAID, Software and Hardware versions with the advantages, disadvantages being discussed along with Basic…

When you add drives to your computer, such as an extra hard drive, a CD drive, or a storage device that corresponds to a drive, Windows automatically assigns letters to the drives. However, this assignment might not suit your system; for example, you might have mapped a network drive to the same letter that Windows…

A hard drive partition can allow you to easily test out new operating systems (like Windows 7 beta) or create a simple way to separate your user data from the operating system install.  You can divide your hard drive into multiple partitions, some bootable, others not. The main reasons for having separate partitions are: to…

This page contains a collection of Disaster Recovery tips & tricks, articles and how-to guides, all related to Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Exchange 2000 and Exchange Server 2003. Please feel free to contact me if you’d like to contribute to this section . Available topics (Sorted in alphabetical order) Press CTRL+F to…