2 “Must Haves” For Your Business Computer

If you are running a home office or small business, your computer is no longer just a toy – it’s a vital part of your business. What happens to your business if your computer is down for a week or, worse yet, all your business data is lost forever?

There are two things you must have on a business computer… an Internet security suite and a data backup system.

A security suite contains, at its core, a software firewall, antivirus and anti-spyware. There will be add-ons like Identity Theft protection, spam protection and parental control, but the main things you NEED are the first three. Read more.
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Cut Costs With Technology

Most of the Wall Street earnings reports coming out these days show a decrease in revenue, but an increase in profits. How is this possible?

By cutting costs. By lowering company expenses, lower income still generates a profit.

We always try to instill cost savings measures when dealing with small businesses. Why spend $400 for Microsoft Office when you can use the free OpenOffice? Why travel on a business meeting when you can teleconference? Why pay long distance phone charges when you can use VOIP?

Several cost cutting measures using technology are outlined in a PCWorld post. They cover things like online phone services, freelancer web sites and offsite file storage and backup.

One tool they cover is ClearApps Network Inventory Advisor. It’s one of those time-saving tools you come across every so often.

Let’s say you have a small business with up to 25 computers and no IT department – how do you keep track of all those computers? For $89 (higher for more than 25 computers), ClearApps will survey all of them, showing you all of the hardware and software (including version!) on each computer, plus give you alerts, like anti-virus not installed or turned off, low hard drive space, etc.

This is a great tool for office managers or computer servicing companies.

Another interesting tool they came up with is called Egnyte. It’s an online file storage/backup service with an interesting twist. For an extra $10/month, you set up an old computer or a hard drive as a file server for your office. By adding Egnyte’s software, it continually backs up all of the files to their server.

That way you have ready access to large files locally, but they’re all backed up offsite. If you lose your Internet connection, no problem. The file server will reconnect and synchronize whenever the connection is restored.

If you just have a single computer, you can opt out of this service and just map a virtual drive to Egnyte’s server for file storage and offsite backups. It’s a little more expensive than, say, Mozy, but it’s worth investigating..
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Time To Transfer Those Old Backup Files

I recently came across a blog by Adrian Wong of TechARP who was experiencing about a 10% error rate on old CD-R’s that had backed up data on them.

Some of these were brand name CD’s and some generic brands, but all were less than 10 years old and were stored in a cool, dry and dark area.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDNet didn’t experience the same data loss rate, but said it may be attributable to verifying the data at the time of backup. He also recommends Elprime Media Recovery ($19.95) for dead disks.

Whatever the case, with the decrease in cost of hard drives and even web space it only makes sense to take any backed up CD’s/DVD’s and transfer them to a new medium.

Read more.
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