Disk Management

Disaster Recovery with Azure Backup for SQL Server VMs

Running VMs in the cloud has become a big part of the modernization of IT infrastructure for most businesses. However, even though those VMs that are in the cloud, the backup mechanisms that they use to provide disaster recovery (DR) capabilities are essentially the same as they would use for on-premise VMs. They often use legacy technologies that require a lot of resources and are difficult to scale.

Last Update: Sep 11, 2023

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Choosing a Disaster Recovery Technology: Backup vs. Replication

Last Update: Sep 11, 2023

There are two primary types of backup technologies and knowing the difference between backup and replication will help you choose the best path forward.

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How can I write (burn) ISO files to CD or DVD?

ISO files are actually images of complete CDs or DVDs compiled as one whole image file (*.iso), just like Ghost does for hard disks and partitions. ISO images can be loaded into several different CD/DVD recording software packages to create CDs or DVDs. ISO Recorder Power Toy (Freeware) Update: ISO Recorder is now compatible with…

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How do I create a mirrored volume in Windows XP (or Windows 2000 Pro)?

You don’t. A mirrored volume, also known as a RAID-1 volume, is a fault-tolerant volume that duplicates data on two different physical disks. Mirrored volumes are supported on dynamic disks, and provide data redundancy by using two identical copies (mirrors) of the volume. You cannot create mirrored volumes on computers that are running Windows XP…

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Do NOT upgrade your disks from Basic to Dynamic by using a custom made MMC!

Creating your own console is a very handy tool, but don’t use it to upgrade a system or boot partition to dynamic disk! On  a W2K/XP machine, when you click ‘Yes, restart’ at the prompt, then the MMC in the background will ask you to save its settings, immediately following an ‘End task’ dialog. Somehow,…

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How can I prevent users from using USB removable disks (USB flash drives)?

Disable USB disk drives without having to also disable USB devices with this simple trick from Daniel Petri.

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How can I control whether Windows 2000’s dynamic disk upgrade is available on my computer?

Windows 2000 introduced the concept of dynamic disks, which let you implement RAID-type disk configurations (e.g., disk mirroring, fault-tolerant striping) and make disk and volume changes without rebooting. Although Microsoft doesn’t support dynamic disks on most laptops, you can enable a dynamic disk on your laptop. Alternatively, you might want to prevent users from upgrading…

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My BOOT.INI file uses a weird SIGNATURE() syntax that I’ve never seen before. In Windows NT 4.0, this always said SCSI() instead. What’s that?

Beginning with Windows 2000, Microsoft has updated the Advanced RISC Computing (ARC) syntax in BOOT.INI to support the SIGNATURE() syntax, which offers a more accurate method for Windows 2000 to boot up in certain conditions. You will see this syntax, which is otherwise identical to SCSI(), if you install Windows 2000 on a hard drive…

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Recover a Deleted NTFS/FAT32 Volume in Windows XP/2003

How can I recover a deleted dynamic NTFS or FAT32 volume in Windows XP or Windows 2000? When you delete a dynamic volume, the OS erases the volume’s file-system boot sector (sector 0) and removes the volume entry from the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Disk Management snap-in private region database. However, as part of this…

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How can I prevent users from writing to USB removable disks (USB flash drives) by using Group Policy (GPO)?

USB removable disks (also known as flash drives or “Disk on Key” and other variations) are quickly becoming an integral part of our electronic life, and now nearly everybody owns one device or another, in forms of small disks, external hard drives that come enclosed in cases, card readers, cameras, mobile phones, portable media players…

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