Month: September 2007

Tapes suck, there’s no question about that! It’s surprising how many places still use them for backup, although I suppose when absolutely massive amounts of data need to be backed up there isn’t a good alternative yet (where are you, inexpensive, massive static holographic memory?) But for individual users and for most small to medium size businesses hard drive backup is a better option; it’s faster, more stable, backed up content is online (or preferably near-online), and the backed up content can be accessed instantaneously without having to read the tape while nervously waiting to see if the dreaded tape read error pops up.

Since the backup hard drives would preferably be cycled so that one or more of them would be physically disconnected from the system to ward off virus/hacker attacks or electric surge damage, it is necessary to be able to disconnect the drive without having to reboot the system. While RAID controllers routinely support hot-swap, few SATA controllers (and probably none of IDE/ATA, or SCSI controllers) do, and even the RAID controllers don’t usually support hot-swap for single volumes. However, the Silicon Image -based SATA controllers like those from Addonics do support hot swap. The other alternative is to use external USB 2.0 or Firewire drives, or—better yet—an internal mobile tray with a USB2-to-SATA bridge. I was glad to see that mobile trays with integrated USB2-to-SATA bridge were finally made available by Addonics, as in the past the only option to achieve the same was to use a separate USB2-to-SATA bridge and then try to figure out where to attach it inside the system chassis. Of course, USB 2.0 interface is not as speedy as SATA (the basic SATA-150 is about three times faster than USB 2.0), but it is still a lot faster than tapes.

There are number of excellent utilities and applications to effectively back up your valuable data to the removable drive. To mention couple of the countless selection, Genie Backup Manager is handy for agent-based workstation backup on a LAN. To back up my workstation I use the excellent Super Flexible File Synchronizer to automatically sync various data directories once a night to the backup drive cartridge currently inserted in the mobile tray. During the day I know no backups are running so I can safely pull the drive (after ejecting it using the Safely Remove Hardware -tool from the system tray), and replace it with another one to be updated the following night. Now if I had a small fire-safe to keep the offline drives! Some people take a drive off the premises once a week (in case one building burns down, the data is still safe 🙂 ) or, if they’re really dedicated, keep one backup drive in the bank safety-deposit box and swap it, say, monthly.

Having “fax” and “versatility” in the same sentence is, of course, an oxymoron but faxes are still used for surprisingly many business communications, partially because no universally accepted (and easy) electronic signing exists yet, and because a faxed smudge of a signature is somehow more legally binding than a typed-out name in a Word document, or scanned and embedded signature in a PDF document.

I recently needed to find a replacement for a fax-machine that was no longer working well, not because the machine itself would’ve been failing, but because the office phones were switched to VOIP some time previously, and fax transmissions don’t like VOIP. Whenever the LAN has more traffic the VOIP compression factor increases which effectively eliminates the “silence” (still thinking in the analogue/acoustic terms) in the fax transmission killing the send or receive that was in progress. The options were to get a POTS line for the fax machine, or to use a fax-service. I opted for the latter as it makes it possible for the people in the office to also retrieve the “office” faxes while on the road, or while working from home. But many people still wanted the arrived faxes printed out in the conventional fashion as well. I searched for some time for the solution, and then stumbled upon Mail Print which automatically retrieves and prints emails and/or their attachments, including PDFs from any standard POP3 account! The fax-service I chose, MyFax.com, sends out the arrived faxes as PDF attachments… I see a solution coming up!

The only remaining problem was the fact that Mail Print currently only runs as a console application and I was planning to run it on the LAN server, preferably as a Windows service. For now, FireDaemon came to the rescue (Frogmore Computer Services is planning to include built-in service support in a future release of Mail Print)! With FireDaemon it was a snap to get Mail Print run as a service. I first configured Mail Print’s settings while logged in as the admin, then set FireDaemon to run the app as a service using the admin account so that Mail Print would use the same settings I had configured at the console (Mail Print stores the configuration settings in the registry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER).

To print the MyFax faxes that arrive as PDF attachments I chose “Print attachments only”. Because Exchange’s Mail Delivery Restrictions/Filters don’t always work as one would except, I chose not to limit accepted senders on the mail server side. Instead, I set up a receive account with a difficult to guess user name (i.e. s0m3-d1ff1cult-t0-gu3ss-us3r@companydomain.com) to prevent 250 pages of Viagra ads being printed over the weekend. 😉 Faxes that arrive at that account are automatically duplicated on arrival at an easy to remember account (i.e. fax@companydomain.com) that only receives emails from internal addresses (i.e. no spam). Mail Print is set to erase the emails from the receive account after they’ve been picked up for printing (Mail Print is set to check for arrived emails every sixty seconds). The end result is that arrived faxes are printed out on a LAN printer, and they’re also available at “fax” account on the company domain which the users can access through the Exchange webmail no matter where they are.

In order for Mail Print to print PDF documents currently a full version (not just the reader) of Adobe Acrobat is needed as Mail Print uses its COM interface which is not available in the Acrobat Reader. A future version of Mail Print may no longer require Acrobat to be present to print PDFs as Frogmore is looking for an alternative library to handle PDF printing internally.

Outbound faxes are sent via MyFax which integrates well with MS Office, and also offers a virtual printer driver. For scanned documents a network scanner is used in combination with Nuance’s PaperPort Professional, which allows easy compositing of documents to be faxed using various sources (scanned documents, Word docs, PDFs, Excel docs, etc.).