Protect your external hard drive

Your data is much more precious than your hardware, so keep it safe from theft!

Think about hiding your external hard drive…

A lot of users now back up data to an external hard disk drive. Whether you accidentally delete a file or have a full system crash, backing up your data to a local hard drive is probably a good idea. Your operating system is likely to have utilities to make this easier, or you may be using third party disaster recovery software which backs up an image to your external hard drive. Either way, this will not protect you if your hard drive is stolen!

Most users place much more value on their data. Hardware is normally insured and you can get replacements easily. However, you simply cannot replace your data and files. Typically when a theft steals a computer, they will simply unplug everything and leg it! Any hardware worth taking will be stolen, but the thief is not going to hang around. He is not interested in anything of low value that is going to be hassle to swipe!

5 Options If You’re Still Using Windows Server 2003

It is hard to miss the news that today marks the very end of the road for Microsoft’s popular Windows Server 2003 operating system. After that date, Microsoft will no longer offer support, maintenance or security patches for computers running Server 2003 leaving businesses reliant on the OS unprotected against software flaws or security vulnerabilities.

With only a few days until the deadline, the chances of realistically planning and executing a migration to another OS are very, very slim. So what are your options moving forward?

1. Don’t panic!

The end of support for Server 2003 does not mean that servers using that OS variant will simply explode tomorrow. Everything should continue running as normal, giving you time to finalise your migration plans and transfer data, services and roles to a new machine.

You could even use this grace period to seek assistance from a third party migration specialist to help make the transition as smooth as possible.

2. Dig deep

Despite official support ending today, Microsoft will actually continue to provide hotfixes and maintenance for Server 2003 indefinitely under certain conditions:

  • Your business takes out a special support contract for each Windows 2003 server.
  • You agree that each support request you lodge with Microsoft may be chargeable.
  • You are able to pay a vastly inflated sum for the contract – the US Navy just paid $9 million for ongoing support of their Windows XP devices for instance.

Gear up for SQL Server 2016 Database Recovery

If you’re an SQL server fan, you’ll fall in love with SQL Server 2016 instantly. The database’s preview release by Microsoft is quite promising and stands apart from the other SQL server releases. The 2016 version won’t revolve around Azure features as much as the previous versions and the reason behind that approach is Microsoft’s plan to blend in a little bit of both worlds – the on-premise flavor of SQL server as well as the Azure SQL database. With the code base for both being common, product changes are expected to be adapted in a more Agile way.

The latest version of the database is bound to include a little for everyone. With an impressive feature set, SQL server 2016 is surely going to be worth the wait. Let’s check out some brilliant features of the forthcoming database version.

Zmanda Client for VMware vSphere and ESXi

Image level backup of VMware based Virtual Machines (VMs)

  • Hot Backups of VMs: Your VMs are backed up using snapshots, without any downtime.
  • Agentless Backup and Recovery: No software needs to be installed on ESXi or VMs. You can also install Zmanda agents within the VM, e.g. if you would like to backup and recover specific directories and applications.
  • Complete image level backup: The whole VM is backed up to an image which is self-sufficient for restore. No need to re-install and re-configure the OS during recovery process.
  • End-to-End restore: The VM can be fully recovered to the original ESXi server or to a different ESXi server - ready for immediate commissioning.
  • Differential backups (block-level): Zmanda's VMware Client tracks the blocks that have changed since the last full backup. During a differential backup run, only changed blocks are backed up. This makes differential backups faster as well as reduces the amount of backup data transferred and stored. During recovery, a full backup image will automatically be combined with the relevant differential backup image. (Requires VMware 4 or higher)
  • Efficient Backup Storage: Only those blocks that are being used by the VM are backed up. Zmanda VMware Client skips the unused raw space on the VMDKs. This considerably reduces the size of backup images as well as makes the backup process faster by reducing the amount of data being transferred. (Requires VMware 4 or higher)
  • Selective restore of VM disks: Recover just the disks you need or recover just the VM configuration.
  • Full Backup Management Features: Leverage all features of Amanda Enterprise with your VM backups: Compression, Encryption, Retention Policy Control, Monitoring and Reporting.
  • Choice of Media: Backup your VM images to disk, tape or cloud.
  • Consolidated Backups: Manage backup of your physical and virtual machine from a unified management console.
  • No Proxy Servers Required: Your VMs will be backed up directly to the Amanda Backup Server, without needing another proxy server required in some solutions.

Using Database Repair for Disaster Recovery

SQL databases disaster recovery

Every DBA will see corruption at some point in his or her career. Hopefully when you do, you'll have a comprehensive set of backups that let you perform a fast, targeted

But what if you can't do either? What if your backups are corrupt, your backups have been failing for months and no one noticed, or the piecemeal restore that you want to perform isn't possible because you're using the SIMPLE recovery model? There have been many articles and blog posts written about using backups to recover from corruptions (see my blog category Backup/Restore for lots of useful links), but very few about what to do when you don't have backups or when your restore operations fail. In this article I'm going to walk you through an example of using the repair functionality built into DBCC CHECKDB, plus older backups, to attempt to salvage some data.

Recovery of corrupted MySQL tables

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It happens that MySQL data files get corrupted and require recovery. The easiest way of checking the integrity of table is by running the following command:


CHECK TABLE messages;

That phrase is going to check for errors in the messages table. If the output data look like in the picture below, it means that the table is fine and no recovery is required.

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In some cases the Msg_text columns might display error messages. In the event of that you need to run REPAIR TABLE, and MySQL will try to fix the problem.

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