 Welcome to TechSoup Talks. This is After the Crash, Minimize Your Downtime. My name is Kami Griffiths and I'd like to welcome Laura Richardson from Uptime Resources and Gregory Sealy from TechSoup. I am the Training and Outreach Manager here at TechSoup and we've been doing webinars for about almost two years now. And we're excited to have this presentation for folks interested in the topic of data recovery. So Laura, I'd like you to tell us a little bit about what you do at Uptime Resources. Hello everyone. I'm happy to be able to be part of this. I run the IT Consulting Group at Uptime Resources, so I've been helping small and mid-sized businesses with all things IT for about eight years now. And we're certainly involved in working with TechSoup as a high percentage of our clients are also in the nonprofit sector. Excellent. Thanks Laura. And Gregory, tell us a little bit about what you do here at TechSoup. Well, I'm a customer service representative and I've been here for almost four years now and I'm doing my time to make sure organizations get all the documents in, get qualified, and then are able to access all the donations that are eligible for. So I spend my time helping organizations access and get set up and get all everything straightened out and get their software, get it back in worst case scenario. But yeah, helping organizations get what they need. Excellent. Thanks and welcome both of you. Before we get started I wanted to quickly go through the agenda. I know that the topic is data recovery, but in order to recover your data you have to do some things, or it's better to do some things beforehand. So we're going to first start talking about what do you do to prevent the problems, documenting your computer or your server, backing up your data, talking about hiring a techie, but spending about 15 minutes talking about what to expect during a restore. And then we'll have about 15 minutes at the end for question and answer. So I'd like to get started by asking Laura, why would you want to make a presentation like this? It's something that we get involved in periodically where we're needing to help a client restore data after some kind of crisis. So a couple of scenarios pop to my mind. And if we can use them as a way to make your life a little easier if it happens to you, I think that would be fabulous. So just to kind of give you a little background on the kinds of things we get involved in, Brian's laptop is near and dear to my heart. He unfortunately had no backup and didn't realize he didn't have no active antivirus application on his system either. So he nicely let his son use his laptop to try to get to Disney.com, and it all went terribly wrong. And he ended up again sort of unknowingly reformatting his hard drive and losing all of his data and ending up with a laptop that was not really usable. So we helped him recover data from his formatted hard drive. But it took him a couple of weeks to get a laptop back to a situation where he could use it again because he didn't really know what applications he had installed on there. He didn't have any record of what he had purchased. And a week or a couple of days ago he'd go by and realize that, oh, something else I normally use isn't here. And then he'd realize he had no installation disks. And it was a painful two weeks. So we'd like to avoid that at all costs really. And then the second one that I wanted to bring up, Gokoma Research Foundation is one of our clients. And while they would have liked to have been here as an in-person case study, they are totally happy for me to talk about their problem. They would like to use their scenarios as a way to prevent this from happening to anybody else. But essentially they had a major exchange server hardware failure. And in the course of trying to recover that, realized that they had not had good backups of that exchange server for almost six months. And they got in a situation where they were about a week without — it took us about a week to get everything totally back up again. And eventually the restore was successful, but they did lose quite a bit of email data. And it's just a situation where no one wants to be in this one. And there was a bright side and a dark side to that whole situation. So I'll be referring to that as we talk more during the presentation. But that's really why I want to be part of this is we should try to avoid those worst-case scenarios and do the best we can to make sure that any kind of failure which will happen is not as painful as these two examples. So that obviously sounds painful. And we had several people submit a little chat questions, comments saying, oh my God, how horrible. Is there anything they could have done to prevent this in the first place? Well, there's a couple of things that may seem obvious, but it's prevention as a moving target. And so these are the kinds of things that you need to do them more often than just once. And it's just a good reminder to go back through and make sure that all of these things are the case. So for example, antibirus software, if you have individual copies they do need to get renewed periodically. So you should just make sure you know when they're current and when they're going to need to be renewed and that you actually have them. Windows updates on the desktop side need to be done. I added a couple of documents that you can download from the Texas website that will explain how to do that. But users will sometimes unknowingly turn them off or prevent them from actually happening or having the PC reboot. So Windows updates are really important. Server maintenance is also important. Microsoft comes out with patches all the time and you need to make sure that those things are applied and that servers are allowed to be rebooted. A lot of them require reboots and so you need to make time for that. If you can avoid it, don't let your kids use your work equipment. We've had so many problems that were unintentionally caused by people's children. So if you can keep them off your machine that would be a good thing. Power protection is huge. If we have a power spike or a power failure and you have equipment that goes down hard, it can break things. So you should definitely be putting servers on UPSs. And we see it often where people will have some servers on a UPS but maybe not all of them or maybe not realize that the battery on the UPS has actually got a red light on it now and not working. So review your power protection situation periodically. Be suspicious about the software that you're installing, especially on the desktop but even on the server side make sure that you know where you're getting it from and that it's important to your business and that it's coming from a good source. And then with any of these things, if you find yourself out of your comfort zone that may be an indication that it's time to hire somebody to come and help you with that. Even if it's a desktop issue, if you're not quite sure if you're really backing up or you're not quite sure if you're really getting Windows updates that might be a good indication that you should bring somebody in an expert in to help you with that. I imagine it's speed recovery to have your data backed up and know where it is. Can you tell us about that? When it comes to desktops and laptops, just identify where your data is and what it is. And again this is a moving target so you need to do it periodically. But make sure that you are backing up and have actually identified what your important data is first. So it could be things like photos and music but what files do you have that you would absolutely need to have and do you know where they are stored on your computer? Another thing that I think is interesting to point out is that when you're buying new equipment these days, it doesn't always come with the installation CDs of old and the keys and things like that. And a lot of new hardware vendors are expecting you to run this utility called Recovery Disk Creator or whatever they call it depending on which manufacturer you're buying equipment from. So when you get new equipment make sure you go through that process of creating that recovery CD and store it in a safe place. If you pull a brie in an accidently reformat your hard drive you're going to need that CD to be able to rebuild your system. And then you should go through and document everything about your desktop or your laptop. There is a download again available from the TechSoup website. It's the template that we use to make sure that we have everything documented but it should include things like serial numbers and service tags. The hardware, all the applications that you have installed even if you think you're going to remember, list them along with any installation keys, and then also any of your service providers that you work with. Where's your website hosted, who's your ISP, and any other hosted services that you use? Again you may think you'll remember them but if you don't use them that often you may forget. And you may also forget how to log back onto them if you don't have, if you have to set up a brand new system. So they're things you should include in documentation. And then on the server side, basically you're doing a similar kind of inventory of all the things that you have on there. But it's important to be conscious of where something is stored. And I'm going to give you a quick scenario here. We were brought in by a new client to restore a single file that somebody had accidentally deleted. And it should have been fairly simple that their techie was on vacation and so they called us to see if we could help. It turned out that when they added a hard drive to their server they had copied all of their data over to the new location but had forgotten to point the backup at the new location. So the backup had been running successfully but they were backing up the wrong data store. So for about three months all of that data that had been created in those three months wasn't being backed up and we couldn't actually restore that single file. So there's only one file loss but it made them realize that we need to go back through and make sure that our backup is pointed at the right set of files. If you have a SQL database make sure that you have a SQL agent to back that up or that you're using a built-in backup utility inside the application that can spit out a file that your backup system can actually back up. You should be backing up system state and actor directory information. And then with Exchange you should think about, this is for email, you should be thinking about whether you're able to restore single files or single messages or if you're backing up the entire mailbox store kind of think through what might you have to recover in a little failure like somebody accidentally delete something versus something major. Network documentation is really important. This is where you keep all this information and again there's a template that you're all free to download and use if you just want to make sure that you have everything documented. Well a great quick overview and I just want to let people know that we didn't want to spend too much time on backup because we've done a couple other webinars on this topic which I'll be sending you links to. So we're kind of plowing to this information kind of quickly but I want to switch gears quickly and bring Gregory on because since TechSoup donated software is a little bit different than software that you'd buy we wanted to talk a little bit about that. So Gregory can you tell us a little bit about how people should be documenting and dealing with their TechSoup donation? Certainly. Again going into this one of our biggest problems is that we lack warehouse space and so in order to be able to get the product to the customers we've gone to a download system which is great because it gets the – we have more product to give out but you have that fragility of not having a physical product in your hand. So it's very important to keep that in mind that there is that fragility. And frankly donation products are either appropriate or reliable to access sometimes once you've gotten it. So you've got to protect it. It's a donation. It's fragile. It can be lost. One of the most important things to do frankly is to access the product when you get it. If you wait too long, you know, versions might change or you can lose things. It can be lost if it isn't accessed relatively quickly. And once you've gotten it to hang on to emails once you get them, physical product disks for example and a couple of our partners do send disks still. Hang on to them. Print out volume license keys or any other product keys or things. You might even want to print out the emails and hang on to this information in case you have to go back later on because TechSoup hangs on to a lot of this information but things can get lost. Individual partners may or may not store this information in their side frequently. Our product is not for retail. So you're dealing with stuff that isn't retail. You call customer service on an individual partner. They won't know what you're talking about. And you can end up losing your product. I want to very quickly go through four of our biggest, largest partners here and go through a little bit about re-accessing the product. I can't talk about all of them because there are too many of them. But again, Microsoft is probably the easiest as far as recovering because they send you physical disks via UPS or FedEx, whatever their mood is at the time. And once you've accessed the volume license keys via their volume license website, you can print the page out. You can hang on to this information. If you lose the software, you can put it back on again. You really haven't lost that much. Or you're still able to get it. They also store the information on their volume license website the next days for two years at the end of a cycle, as we say in TechSoup, during which time you have access to them. You can go back. You can redown with the product again or you can purchase media again. At the end of that two years, it goes away and you lose that ability. So it's important to try and hang on to that. But again, Microsoft, if you have the information, is fairly easy. Next is Adobe. Adobe is entirely a download thing. However, at the website there is both the current version still available and I think I'll be releasing the archive tab where you can go in and you can actually download the previous version. If you get one version beyond that, you've lost it. You need to hang on to that email because I will have the serial number key that you need to reinstall the product. Generally speaking, you do, but you do have more time with that partner to be able to get in case you've lost the software. With Intuit and their QuickBooks and such, they are the version lasts for about a year. We are able to back in and use the link and get back into the website. We can frequently find previous versions, but not always and they do at some point when the versions will finally go away. But you generally have a year, a bit more of time within which if you lose something, you are able to get it back. Again, it is so important to back in and hang on to this stuff because once it is gone, this is not for retail version and it can be very difficult to re-access if it is lost. And finally, the Symantec. Symantec used to sell this in the disk. We stopped doing that now. This is an entirely downloaded version which means you are dealing with links and emails with the keys and such. As long as the version hasn't changed, you can still go back using the same email and you can re-access the product again. Once the version has changed, we can often find it. Symantec is a large number of products and there can be things lost or that kind of thing. Sometimes Symantec will choose to, you know, the product isn't very popular. We will move it from the catalog at which point if you had that product and it's gone and you go up the computer, you may end up losing it. Obviously, the subscription is to expire for the definitions, but the product is still. You can use your own number to get it fairly easily. Great. Thanks, Gregory. And we do have about 30 other vendor partners, but it's very different depending on the vendor. So we only wanted to talk about the main folks that we, software that we distribute. So now that we've discussed documentation and identified what to back up, Laura, can you briefly tell us how we do back it up? I just wanted to comment that there's a whole different range of skill sets and perspectives coming into this. So some of this may be review and other of it may sound too technical for everybody, but we're trying to kind of hit the middle here. And I just wanted to make sure that we were all talking about backups from the same perspective. So a backup really is when I talk about a backup, it's a combination of both software and a target for the data that you're backing it up to. And from the software perspective, there's products that run on the PCs, and then there are products that run on the servers. But on the PCs, I wanted to point out one that is kind of interesting. Symantec has a product called Ghost, and other vendors make something similar as well. But it's a way to get a snapshot of your system as it's set up in that particular point in time. So that would include, it's basically an exact copy of your hard drive at the moment you make it. And so it does include things like data and all the applications that you have. So for people who would like to get a snapshot of a single point in time, you should be thinking about products like that. And then there are other products that essentially just backup data for the desktop side so it may not do things like keep track of your applications for you. It would really be backing up files. And so kind of think about software in terms of what it's actually doing for you. And then on the server side, we actually encounter the same thing. Of mature products like Symantec Backup Exec, you have the ability to select what you want to backup, and that could include things like active directory and how your domain is actually configured. But it doesn't have to, and so make sure that you know what you're backing up. Are you backing up just data, or are you backing up information about your entire network? There are many products that people use to backup their data. And so management type people should know what you're using. And obviously engineers, my biggest recommendation is to try to keep a support contract current and to stay on the current version of whatever software you're using if it's at all possible. If you get stuck with a messy restore and you wish you had somebody to call, the software vendor can actually be quite helpful. On the target side, I just wanted to mention that we're still seeing an awful lot of tape drives as the target for data for folks and for companies. And so the upside of tapes is that an individual tape is not that expensive. And so I would recommend keeping enough tapes so you can have a nice historical record. For example, glaucoma research and their kind of sad situation, they ended up to be lucky in that they had a set of tapes that extended back years. And so even though they had months of exchange backup failures, they had the ability to go back to a tape that was six months old. We have met companies and organizations that only keep five tapes. They have a Monday through Friday tape and they overwrite them every week. Well, if you have a whole week of failures, you may end up with a set of tapes that are completely useful and have nothing on them. So tapes are not expensive and I would say please add some to your backup set and make sure that you keep them as long as you can or as long as you think you'll need them. And if you're taking them off site, you should be running a version of software that will encrypt them. So in case you lose them, you're not going to be totally stressed about the data that's on them. Just based backups are definitely becoming more prevalent. There's a number of ways that you can do it including just replacing your target tape drive with a hard drive. Hard drives are mechanical so make sure you're testing your backup frequently so that if you have a failed hard drive where your backup is going to, you can replace that hard drive before you need it. But there are other vendors that do this as well. Barracuda is one that we're familiar with. They give you basically by hard drives and the software that runs your backup comes with it. And there's a bunch of automated off-site services as well that people can be looking at. The idea here is that you get your data off-site automatically. They handle all of that for you. Single file restores are very easy. And I've listed some that we're familiar with that we do like. The biggest thing to remember is that if you're restoring an entire server or an entire hard drive on a PC from an off-site backup, it takes a long time to download 50 gigs, 80 gigs, 250 gigs, depending on what your backup size is. So be aware of that. Just be conscious of the fact that downloading an entire backup if you have a restore situation, it can actually take quite some time. Great. So now that we know the backup process, but how do we know when we need to hire someone or can we do this ourselves? What I basically tell people is as soon as you feel a little bit out of your comfort zone, that's a good time to talk with a technical person. I've included a list of questions that you can use as a basis to discuss internally in your organization or with your technical contact. It's about 30 questions. And I would say that if you have difficulty answering any of them with any kind of confidence, that might be an indication that you want to bring someone in even for a short-term kind of project to help you get a handle on those. Management should have an understanding of what the answers are to those questions as well. Some of them are pretty technical, but they all have say a 30,000-foot perspective that's important for the entire organization to understand. So for example, if you lose a server like glaucoma lost their exchange server, everybody in the organization and that kind of management perspective should understand what a likely restore window would be. And I often meet people who think that we could restore an exchange server in a half a day to a day. Sometimes it's possible depending on the kind of backup they have, but for the most part we're looking at a number of days even in a good situation. And I think it's important for everybody to at least understand how the answers to those questions impact their organization and also on a day-to-day basis how it would impact the other people in the company. If you are testing your restores, and everyone should, you should at least do single file test restores on your backup whether it's a PC-based backup or on a server. If they're failing and you don't know why, that's a good time to get somebody on site to help you with that. If you walk into your server room and see a whole bunch of red lights on your server and you don't really know why or why they're there, that would be another good time to get somebody in, again prevent it before it actually dies. And if you have a hard drive in your server that's not functioning properly, get it replaced before it causes major problems. If you can have somebody come in and give you an audit on your backup system, that's not a bad idea to do that. It's one of the things we all like to think that we won't ever have to use. But as a consulting company get in a situation a number of times every year where we're having to restore servers that fail just due to age or whatever. And I think we get a phone call three or four times a week for one of our clients asking us to help them restore a single file that they accidentally deleted or somehow got corrupted. So backups are important. You know there's a comment that I want to send a second addressing. Danny says, as a tech use support, several nonprofits, I find a lot of push back from the NPOs about paying for tech support. I find that small nonprofits simply don't think of budgeting for such things. We had talked about this when we were planning about that. Some small investments can really help you out. Can you address that? Yeah, we tend to work with nonprofits that do have an identified IT budget, but we also work with a number of contractors here in the Bay Area whose billable rates are not really that high. They're somewhere between say $35 to $70 an hour. And for nonprofits that don't have servers, they just have maybe a small peer-to-peer network or individual PCs. These contractors who we work with would be able to set up an off-site backup system that may cost between $10 and $20 a month per machine. It would probably take them an hour per machine to get that set up at the most. So investing a couple hundred dollars would be all that organization needs to make sure that their data is safe. And recovering data from a machine that has not been properly backed up can take thousands of dollars if you have to send a hard drive out to get it restored. So a couple hundred bucks for a set of PCs and you can actually get data backed up. And again, on the server side, I kind of strongly feel that if you're running a server and it's running your business, then again, you need to invest at least a quarterly visit from an IT professional to just audit it and make sure the patches are applied and take a look at the health of the system and to test the backup to make sure that you're not in a situation like glaucoma was where they thought they were backing up but they actually weren't. And again, that doesn't have to be that expensive. It could be as little as say $300, $400 a quarter. It was an expensive restore process for glaucoma and it would have been much less expensive for them to proactively have us come in and test their backup monthly. By the way, they have actually changed their contract with us so we are now working with them in that capacity where once a month we test their backup and we do all the proactive maintenance for them so they just have a better comfort level of where they're at. But they were trying to say buy team money which is fair enough but for them they wished they had done it differently. So let's start talking about the restore process and what it looks like and how do you do a restore? So this is always interesting for people who have never gone through it. The timeline can actually take a while. So for example, you have a machine whether it's a PC or a server, something will stop working and that's when people kind of raise the red flag. Oh, I can't get email anymore or I can't do something and it seems broken. So unless it's something totally obvious it may be that you need to get your IT person involved. And the first step is trying to identify what the problem actually is, what broke. Well that can take a while. And it can take a while. It can even become a little more frustrating for everybody when we have a bunch of people standing in front of the machine saying, well what do you think it is and how do we do this and what do we do? And that can be a number of hours. Once we identify what broke, then we need to actually wait for the replacement component. And so this is where I think everyone should take a look at what kind of warranty they have on their most important equipment. Say it's a server that's actually running the organization. If you have a warranty where you can get same day parts then that's certainly going to shave off time on this timeline here. But for the most part it's next day. So we're already into 24 hours before we even have a working server. Once we have fixed hardware, the next step that we go through is to reinstall the operating system and reinstall the backup software. Now it can actually take 2 to 4 hours to do that. So we've already are half day into the next day where we have a server that's now ready to have the data restored to. The final step is to take the backup system whether it's a hard drive or a tape and to restore the data to the server. And kind of a general rule of thumb that I think people should talk about internally is however long it takes for you to backup your data nightly is how long it will take to restore it roughly. So if you have a backup that takes 5 hours to do every night, that's probably why you schedule it say at midnight because when people tend to be using the system, well if it takes 5 hours to back it up it's going to take 5 hours to take the data off that system and to put it back on the server. So it's not uncommon at all to have a 3-day restore process. And that third day is a combination of getting the data back on there but also helping individual users with any glitches or any little problems that have come up from their restore. In the case of Glow Comet it was over a week. And one of the reasons for them that it took so long was the tape that we had to go back to didn't have domain information on there. So we actually had to recreate their domain from scratch for the 20 users before we could even apply the 6 month old backup. So it's always eye-opening I think for people to sit through a discussion about what does it mean for their organization to restore a particular server or a particular PC and to think about how long is it really going to take? If you have a PC with 50 gigs of data being backed up on it it's going to take quite some time to download all of that from the web. So this sounds like a long time. What can people do to reduce the time or make it less painful? One of the things that is good to think about is if you have the ability to have any spare hardware in your organization. And it may be that you just have an older PC or when you do get some money to spend on IT that you buy an extra PC you can actually have a huge productivity hit even if the whole network is fine and you just have a hard drive die on somebody's PC and deadlines are what they are and all of a sudden they don't have a machine to work on anymore. And so if you can move over to a spare PC you should be able to continue working. So spare hardware is definitely useful. I think upgraded warranties and maintenance agreements are an excellent way to reduce the restore time. For example, we are often recommending IBM or HP servers. We have a number of organizations that have Dell as well. But if you can upgrade your warranty to a same day hardware restore you can shave off 24 hours potentially on a restore process. The other thing I would look at is some lower end equipment only comes with a one year warranty. Obviously all nonprofits expect to use a server for longer than a year. So if you can upgrade that warranty to same day and extend it to say five years which is typically what we see our nonprofits hoping equipment will last. Obviously it can even be longer than that but definitely five years. Then for the lifetime of that server you know you can get same day replacement parts. So that kind of dovetails into my next point which is white box servers become very problematic. These are ones that may be built from scratch not recognizable equipment manufacturers. As they age getting replacement parts I can easily bring the server back up again becomes more complicated. So for example if you have a four year old white box server and you have a motherboard that dies finding a motherboard that will fit into that server that will work with all the drivers and work with all the data that you have can actually be really time consuming. And depending on what you need to buy you may not even be able to get it overnight. So I would avoid white box servers if you can possibly help it. Faster internet connections will definitely improve restore time especially on the desktop or the PC side. If you need to download an awful lot of off-site data and you don't have a local copy you're just relying on an off-site service. The faster your internet connection the faster you can get your data restored. So that kind of brings up another area where you may want to think about the value of having a local backup. I think off-site services are excellent especially for single file or single folder restores. The data size tends to be fairly small. But especially for a server or a large hard drive on a PC it's nice to have a local hard drive or a local backup tape that we can go to without having to deal with the time, leg of downloading data over the internet. And then lastly making sure that you have good documentation. You can really get tripped up on a restore process if you can't find the key to get the operating system installed. Or you don't have the installation media and someone needs to go find it or download it from another machine before you can even reinstall the operating system. So having good documentation knowing what you had installed in the first place and having all the installation keys can really save an awful lot of running around with what you need to install. I think another thing that I would encourage everyone to think about are some safety nets for critical applications that you can have in place to make the time that you're waiting for the equipment to get repaired to make that time more palatable for everybody. So for example, those of you who are using Microsoft Exchange as your email system, Microsoft has a service. They refer to it as MEHF continuity. Actually it's in their business productivity suite now. And what continuity does is in addition to filtering your mail for viruses and spam which I think is definitely a good thing, it will give all of your users a 30-day rolling mailbox of all of their mail that they've sent and received. So if your Exchange server is dead, as long as they can find a computer with an internet connection with a web browser they can continue to send and receive email. Now it lacks your shared contacts and shared folders and also the calendars and things like that. But at least your community that you work with doesn't need to know that you're in the middle of a huge Exchange failure. So that safety net isn't that expensive. I think it's $10 to $20 per user per year, something like that. And it means that even if you have a total hardware failure you're not really without email. You could look at hosted services for the most critical things that you do as well. There's things like hosted SharePoint or hosted Exchange where you're not responsible for maintaining a redundant system for your email because it's hosted, the vendor actually does that for you. And if email tends to be, but if email is the most important thing for your organization then at least you have a way of saying that email is the most stable as well. With files having an off-site or an automatic off-site backup of your files means that if you have a file server failure and your files are no longer available you could in theory restore a single file or those important ones that you were working with restore them from the off-site backup to another location. So you work from home, you restore that single file to your home system, and you can continue to work on those files while your main servers or main systems are being repaired. That could actually hold true for the PC user as well. It may be that you do have access to more than one PC or more than one Mac. So if your main system is in the repair shop you can download a backup file from your backup system and work on another machine. I think another important question to ask especially for organizations and more than a few people is if you lose your primary server or your main server does everybody in the company still have the ability to access the Internet even if the server is down? And so it may be that you do have more than one server but the second one hasn't been set up to be a backup DNS server so that people can keep getting to the Internet even if their main server is down. So these are things that you can do to make the restore or the repair time of your equipment a little bit more palatable. But it's going to be different for every organization I think is listening to the call. So when you sit down and run through that questionnaire that I've added to the downloads that you can get to you need to be clear about what the most important things are to the organization and what are the things you could live without for a few days. And then come up with a safety net for each one of those really critical applications. So you can kind of limp through the downtime and the limping through it is much better than not being able to move at all. So if you can come up with a way to limp through it, you'll be grateful for doing that. Becky- Lots of great information. And there's been quite a few questions that have come through. So unless you have anything else you want to say about this I'm going to move into questions. Is that okay Laura? Laura- No, that's fine with me. Becky- Okay, great. So if you have any questions at this point please submit them via the chat box. Becky will be holding them. And I'll ask them. We should be able to get to most of them. We've got about 15 minutes. So one question from Ellen, can a recovery CDB be created at any point beforehand? Laura- Yes. It's a short answer to that. It's going to be different for every hardware vendor. And if you want a specific answer to that I would be more than happy to take this offline and have you send me information about the machine that you have. And if I can't answer it, I can definitely have one of my engineers answer it for you. It depends on the age of the machine and what actually came with it when you bought it. But the new ones do have that utility you can get to which is to create your recovery CDs. And I can't tell you where that is off the top of my head but I could tell you where it is specifically if we want to take that offline. The other thing that you may want to look at is for machines that are a little bit older and you don't have the media that you know originally came with it to take a look at a product like Symantec Ghost or any product that will actually image your PC and take a snapshot of everything on it. In some ways that accomplishes the same mission. You'll have an identical copy of your hard drive with all of your data in that point in time as well as all the applications that were installed. And that can be a nice local snapshot of your system. The reason I bring that up is I work with a consultant here in the Bay Area who works with a lot of nonprofits. And she can set up a system like that in an hour or two for somebody with a PC as long as they have purchased the software. So again, you do have to purchase the software and you would have to spend a couple of hours with her. But I think she's charging about $45 an hour. So it doesn't always have to be super expensive to make sure that you're just not going to lose your important stuff. And Danny had a question, what programs do you suggest to accomplish the backups? And he listed Acronis, Norton Ghost, others. Yeah, Ghost is something that we use often. I'm looking at one of my engineers sitting next to me right now, but Mitesh, do you have any other ghosting software that you like to use besides Symantec? He's saying no. That's the one we've just standardized on because it's reliable. But I would be more than happy if we want to take that one offline to come up with a list of ones that people do like and have used. And I can share that with everyone who's been on the call. Okay, and we do have the forums that we've started. So Laura, I'll send you the information for that so you can, perhaps we can take that discussion there, and then the larger group will be able to read that information. So another question, oh there's quite a few questions about backing up a disk. Is there a way to back up an auto-playing installation disk? And then there's questions specific to allowing, is it, can we burn licenses onto disks? And these were discussions that we had in planning. Could you address kind of how people can back up their software and what's legal and what's not? So I think what the caller is questioning is when you purchase software and you're downloading it, which you're actually downloading as an auto installer, and people tend to just click run or run it from that particular portion. And so I think what the questioner is asking is, okay well if you go ahead and do that and you install what you've got, how do you back that up? So basically once you install that program there's no way to back up the original installer so that you can install it on say another computer. I'm sorry, someone's talking to me at the same time here. The installer can be backed up, but the program once it's installed cannot unless you're ghosting the machine. So I think that would be a good place to have a techie come in and take a look at what you do have installed and where are the automatic folders that were created during that installation so you're selecting the right thing in your backup job to make sure that you are backing that up. But if you have a lot of those applications installed on a PC, I think that would be a good reason to get an image or a ghost image of that machine so you don't actually have to go through all of that when you do have to restore your hard drive. So I think I'd also like to point out, and we talked about this in the planning, if you for example with TechSoup you get a link to a download file instead of just opening it and running it, you don't want to save that to your computer locally at which point you can back that up. Right, and you also want to save that email as well. I think that was brought up earlier on in the talk, but that particular email that has all that information in it is something you don't want to lose. So include that email or cut and paste it out of your email and put it in your documentation document that you may have printed out or at least you're including in your backup jobs. You know where did you originally get it from and what was the key that you used to install it. All of that should be something that you save. And Gina had a question about, and I don't know if you mentioned this, how about using external hard drives for backup? I think it's fine to use external hard drives for backup, but people need to keep in mind that they fail as well. It's just another hard drive, but it is a nice low cost way of having a local backup copy. So I would say definitely consider that as in your arsenal of targets for your backup, but schedule it into your months or every couple of weeks we're actually testing that, and you're doing a test restore, and you're convinced that that particular hard drive is still in good working order. The other thing to keep in mind is that unless you're swapping out hard drives and taking one off site, you've got an onsite backup that, you know, if God forbid the worst happens and your building burns down, your external hard drive goes with it. Or if the water pipe above your system breaks, it may hit your external hard drive as well as your primary system. So it may not be sufficient, but it's a necessary and nice piece of what your backup system could look like. And Melina had a question. When you were talking about servers, they were wondering what is the average lifespan of a server? I think five years is a reasonable lifespan for a server, but there's a lot of factors that are going to play into that. If you're just talking about age, again, it could be five years, but if you have the server sitting in a really dusty place and it's getting filled up with stuff and it's getting hotter than you'd like it to be, you can easily reduce a lifespan of a server just because it's in a bad location and it's getting too hot and it's filled with stuff. I mean, we've even seen servers that had mice living inside of them. And whenever those things happen, you're not going to get five years out of it. When we're working with a client, we tend to start in year number three, planning for when are we going to replace that system. And it's a combination of is it still meeting your needs? Can it run all the applications you need to do? What's the physical lifespan look like of that server? And if it's clean and well maintained, three years is way too early to replace it. We have some servers that are still six and seven years. What we tend to do with the six and seven-year-old servers is they're relegated to less important roles where we all know exactly what we're going to do when they fail, because of course they will at some point in time, and that it's performing a service for the organization that they can live without so that we all have time then to either replace the server or to move what it was doing to different equipment. Sarah's question, is it advisable to keep backup tapes at the director's home? Sometimes that's your only choice. And I would say if they can be encrypted, I wouldn't worry about it at all. If they're not encrypted, then you really need to think about what's on them. I think you need to expect that your house will get broken into and someone's going to steal it. And just go through that scenario in your head. And if you can live with what they steal because you think it's not sensitive data, then if you have unencrypted tapes in someone's home, that's a choice that you can make. But if you assume that they will get stolen or lost or dropped in the backyard or whatever happens to it, if they're encrypted then you have much less to worry about. You have to be careful about where you're storing them. So if you're putting them in a place where they can get damp or full of dust or heat, you can ruin a tape as well. So make sure that they're stored in a decent storage location. Sarah's question has to do with Outlook Calendar and Contacts. Is it really enough to export those folders as PST files, like they say? I'm sorry, can you say that one more time? I missed part of that. It has to do with exporting Outlook Calendar and Contacts and is exporting a PST file enough. Okay, so what you're doing when you export a PST file is you're taking the mail out of an exchange store and you're moving it to a different kind of file structure. And that's actually a great question because what will happen oftentimes is the archive is set up to take that mail out of the exchange system which is backed up and store it to a local drive on the PC that is oftentimes not backed up. So the user may not feel that that mail that's stored in their PST file is any less important than the mail they have in their exchange. And they may not even think of them as being different because you access both of them with Outlook. But if their hard drive on their PC were to die, that PST file goes with it unless it was backed up. So those things tend to be relatively small. You could copy one to a DVD to keep a backup copy of just the PST file if you want to take more responsibility for your own mail. Some other companies that we work with let their users copy those PST files to the server so they can be included in the backup job. But that's actually a great question. I think all organizations and individual users should really sit down and think about where is their mail stored? And for individual users you may not even ever be downloading it from your ISP so it may always be in the cloud. But if you're downloading it to your PC you should make sure that you're backing that up or you'll lose it all when your hard drive dies. Darik's question, can I use Symantec Ghost over a number of systems or is it a per license for user license? It depends on how you purchase it. You can buy a per user license that when we're selling it to larger organizations we're often selling them like a 20 user license kind of thing depending on how many people they have in there. And then for IT shops like us, there's even other kinds of licensing structures that we can tap into. So it really depends. But if you're walking into a retail location it's a single user license. Peter's question, do you have any experience with open source cloning like Clonezilla? I do not personally know. Okay so if anybody else out there has, if you wouldn't mind sending that via the chat then we can do a little crowd sourcing. The question about how can I set up an automatic top 3 email backup? An automatic top 3 email backup. Well what I'm thinking the user is talking about is that they are downloading their mail to their PC when they're reading it. And so a way to set up an automatic backup of that you probably have a couple of choices. One of them would be if you're using something like Mozi or Connected you can include that in your backup job. And so that could be backing up in almost real time. Those services tend to back up when your computer is idle. So that would be something that's kind of like almost a set it and forget it except for the sense that I would recommend people testing it every once in a while. But that way that mail that you're downloading from your POP account will be automatically backed up. If you're using Outlook, POP goes automatically to a PST file. And so again if you just do a quick search on your computer for all your PST files you should make sure that that location or those files are included in your backup job. If you don't have something automated like Mozi or one of those similar services then periodically you can put it as a calendar event if you have to do this manually but you should be copying those PST files to a DVD or CD or something like that. Or it could be an external hard drive that you have as well. One question had to do with all of the files that you've been talking about during the presentation. I wanted to remind people that I'll be attaching these documents to the follow-up email that will go out sometime this afternoon. So there's about 4 documents that Laura put together. Those will be sent to you as an attachment to an email that will be going out. Another question that Terry had is can you encrypt an external hard drive? You can. You can buy external hard drives that come with encryption technology already as part of what you get. And so that also holds true for things like the thumb drives that people are using. Some folks with PCs that have not a ton of data they use an encrypted thumb drive as one of their backup destinations. And there's also software that you can use that can encrypt external hard drives. So PGP is one that we've used in a number of places where it's encrypting the hard drives in the PC, but it can also encrypt a target external hard drive or thumb drive with the same encryption technology that's being used to encrypt the hard drive in the laptop, for example. So you have two ways of doing it. You can buy software that lets you do that, or you can actually on purpose buy a device that comes with encryption technology. Danny has a question. What about those machines that come with a recovery on a separate partition? Can you make a disk of that? Yeah, you should actually, because you should assume through the separate partition that's useful if you get your data corrupted or mess something up. But the idea is that that's the information that you'd need on a DVD, and you should make a DVD of that. The other thing that I guess generally we believe on my engineering side is that relying on built-in recovery and built-in snapshotting where you can kind of move to a previous point in time on your PC, those things are not always reliable. So they're sold as a nice feature for a PC, especially in Windows where you can backtrack. If you install software and it doesn't work and you've messed yourself up, you can backstep to a different point in time. They're not 100% reliable. So I would just throw that out there that even if they've worked for you in the past, I wouldn't always expect them to because it does fail for us in the field every once in a while. A question from Khan, do you have a list of software that we can use as a techie for performing restores for desktops? I do. Off the top of my head I don't, but I would be more than happy to send that to Kami after the call. That one may take an extra day for me to pull together, but my field engineers have all sorts of tools that I'd be happy to share with everyone on the call for dealing with things like viruses and malware and restores. And even the tool that one of my engineers used to restore that data from the Format at Hard Drive, I'd be happy to share that with people as well. Again, they're not always successful in restoring data as a bit of an art, or recovering data if you delete it as a bit of an art. But we do have some that seem to work pretty well over the last year or so. So what I'll do is I'll send the email out today in a few hours and then probably on second email tomorrow with this list. And it will all be included on the archive page that's on the TechSoup site. Another question from John. What are the advantages of having a spare PC, or would a RAID, and this is in capital letters, drive be good? RAID is better than not RAID, but you can still have things go wrong that break the RAID set. So the advantage of having a spare PC really is you can immediately move over to something that's working. A rated disk set will protect you from some things that can happen. But if the RAID software is messed up for the hardware RAID that you might be using, sometimes you can actually break the RAID set so the disks are no longer functioning. You can't read the data off them. And you're still in a situation where you have to rebuild that. It's not permanently lost data, but you haven't solved the time problem essentially with that. So it's better than not doing it definitely. And when we're building servers we do the same thing. We would never put a server in place that has just one hard drive. RAID implies that you have multiple hard drives that work as a team essentially for the non-techie people on the call. And if one hard drive dies in a RAID set, the machine keeps working. So on a server we definitely do that. People do it on PCs as well, and that's better than not having it. But I don't think that's sufficient. You shouldn't assume that you're protected against everything. You've just taken out some of the things that could happen to you that would mess you up. A question from Ellen. If you do have the documentation for key codes, is there a way to create it at this point? Say that one one more time. I think that they don't have their key codes, the softwares installed, but they don't have the keys any longer. Yes, it depends on what the application is. There are ways of recovering the keys. I know in the Microsoft world, especially on servers, we have to do that sometimes. But if you're talking about a desktop, what I would say is if you really are in a situation where you've got software you're using, you have no idea where you got it from, but you love it. You have no idea where the keys could be and you can't get it from the vendor. I would say that's a great excuse or a great time to say, okay, I'm going to have to image this PC or Ghost, for example. And if you take an image of that and you store it on a separate hard drive, then that is a way to mitigate the risk of no longer having any installation information about what you have on your computer. Well, that's time. That's some great information. Thank you so much, Laura. If there are additional questions, which there are about probably 15 questions, we weren't able to get to some of my apologies for that. But please do post those questions to our community forums. I will send this information to Laura so she can follow up via our community forums as opposed to email. And here's a tiny URL that will lead you to that forum post if you want to start posting your questions there. One thing I would add to that is for those of you who are very technical on the call, if you have some specific technical questions that I only have answered or punted on, definitely post them because I don't want to leave you with no answers we have people who work with me here who are very senior in all different categories of things. So I would happily send those kinds of questions off to them to get a nice answer for you on. So don't be shy. If you've got something you want to know, go ahead and post it. Thank you so much for that. And to wrap up, if you're new to TechSoup and there's all sorts of things that we offer other than webinars and donated software, so we've got community forums and articles and we promote upcoming events. So please check out more of our website. There's some upcoming webinars I'd like to tell you about next week's program is Creating a Successful Refurbishing Program. The following week we'll be talking about Facebook and then into April we'll be talking about donor databases. So I'd like to thank ReadyTalk again for their support of this program. ReadyTalk helped nonprofits and libraries in the U.S. and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas and increased collaboration through their audio conferencing and web conferencing tools. So thank you everyone for participating in this webinar and thanks Laura and Gregory for your great presentation. I hope this helped answer some questions and I also hope you can participate in another TechSoup Talks webinar. Have a great day everyone. Thank you Laura. Bye-bye. Thank you.