Simply check out the Apple website and enter your serial number to see if your iMac's hard drive can be upgraded for free.

Apple may replace your hard drive free of charge…

If you bought an Apple iMac product between December 2012 and September 2013, Apple or and Authorised Service Provider may replace your hard disk drive free of charge. All you need to do is visit their website and type in the serial number of your product to see if it’s effected.

Apple relies on quality hard drives to power their products and where there may be data recovery issues, they are always quick to help. Hard disk drive manufacturers do unwittingly release drives with bugs – more often than not relating to firmware codes. Although it is rare, this does happen and sometimes products can be recalled.

Is the hard drive becoming obsolete...

Currently hard drives rely on SATA III and until recent years the utmost speed of 6GB per second has been fine. They have been able to keep up with speeds of wired and wireless technology – but for how long? Faster data transfer speeds such as 5G which gives 1TB per second, mean that the hard disk drive may soon struggle to keep up.

This is where solid state drives (SSDs) may well be the answer. Users are becoming more aware of the benefits of SSD and one in three laptops now use this technology. Certainly we expect to see a drop off in hard drive usage for consumers, especially as mobile devices become more popular. However, solid state drives are still more expensive than their equivalent hard drives and the price per gigabyte is unlikely to drop significantly any time soon. With businesses and data centres consuming vast amounts of data, price is critical and they may well spell the future for hard drives.

Similarly we must remember that unlike planar 2D technology which is now spent and non-scalable, hard disk drives still have plenty of life left in them. New developments and greater densities are constantly evolving and in our opinion hard drive still represent the immediate future. Would all the hard drive manufacturers still be pumping huge resources into hard drive technology if they really thought it was on the way out?

Hint: R does not stand for Re-build or Re-initialize, or even Re-Format or Re-arrange.

All joking aside, most people in the IT field understand what a RAID array is and how it can help protect your data if used correctly, but many people do not understand what to do in the event of a system or drive failure.

Disaster recovery in SQL Server relies on three components: people, processes and technology. Your failover and failback solutions must minimize SQL Server data loss. Edgewood Solutions' Greg Robidoux guides you through decisions you'll face, including that of the appropriate DR budget to match your business goals.

There are several components to your disaster recovery plan. Enabled people, processes and technology are areas that rely upon one another. I'll discuss the level of importance all three have on a successful DR plan.

The reason for creating a DR plan is to ensure that your systems will continue to run as needed in case of any failure, whether large or small. In most cases, disaster recovery scenarios never get exercised. They act more like an insurance policy minimizing data loss and/or downtime to the smallest amount possible in the case of a failure.

Before you begin putting together a realistic DR plan, you need to think about two things: budget and need. Just about anything is possible if you have enough money, but your budget is one area that often causes you to implement a less than ideal disaster recovery solution. For the second element, need, ask yourself if your disaster recovery plan is the proper plan for meeting your business goals. In many cases, disaster recovery plans are over-engineered because of a budget surplus or the strategists do not understand the true business need. Or, the plan is under-engineered because of a lack of dollars or, again, the assessment of the real business need wasn't thorough enough.

Before you begin selecting and implementing a plan, answer these two questions:

• If a failure occurs, how much data loss can I afford?
• If a failure occurs, how much downtime can I afford?

Once you answer these questions, you can begin to formulate the type of solution you need as well as the costs. Oftentimes when speaking with clients the first answer is we cannot afford any data loss and we do not want any downtime. When you discuss the dollars needed in order to meet their criteria, the client's tune usually changes and so does the plan. Next, the real analysis begins.

So let's take a look at the three areas -- people, process and technology -- to see what needs to be put in place in order to have an effective DR plan within your budget.

Using VDR without vCenter, in which situations?

I wonder why would someone would want to use VMware Data Recovery (VDR) without vCenter. Yes there might be a case for that. In case you’re running vCenter as a Virtual Machine (which is good practice) and this VM is being protected by High Availability (HA). Then if something goes wrong with your vCenter VM (let’s say you loose vCenter) and you need to full restore from your backup storage, you should can use VDR for that….

Background When you see the your database in Suspect mode that a code red situation. Its not something that you face everyday. It can happen, however, most often due to faulty hardware or operational mistakes (like deleting a transaction log file). This post will show how to recover from suspect mod

Background

When you see the your database in Suspect mode that a code red situation. Its not something that you face everyday. It can happen, however, most often due to faulty hardware or operational mistakes (like deleting a transaction log file). This post will show how to recover from suspect mode, but still go through SQL-server error logs and find out the root cause of the error.

Reason

At start-up, SQL Server attempts to obtain an exclusive lock on the device file. If the device is being used by another process  or if the file is missing, sql server start displaying error.

In these cases, there is usually nothing wrong with the devices and database. For the database to recover correctly, the device must be made available, and the database status must be reset.