Tomorrow is World Backup Day

What have you backed up lately?

If you are a systems admin, you probably already have a backup solution in place at the office or for your clients.  Take some time tomorrow to check in on those processes to make sure you aren't missing something important and that they are working the way you expect.

At home, check on or implement a solution for your important files and photos on your home computers.  It can be as simple as purchasing a portable drive or using a cloud based solution.  I'm a SugarSync fan myself.  If you want to check out SugarSync for yourself, use this referral code and get some bonus free space.

With the proper backup solution in place, your home laptop can be almost instantly replaceable with no worries.  I recently reinstalled the OS on my netbook and was able to sync all my data files right back on with SugarSync.  It's easy and helps me sleep better at night!

Learn more about World Backup Day at http://www.worldbackupday.net/

Upcoming - TechDays Technology Guru Speakers!

PacITPros and LearnIt have teamed up to bring you an opportunity to learn more about the future of mobile and cloud technologies. Todd Lammle and Mark Minasi will be joining forces on April 5th from 1pm-6pm, covering some great topics.

Todd will cover Cisco's plans for taking wireless networks to a new level, Mark will cover the future of the cloud and then they will join forces to discuss IPv6 and the future of the related networking technologies.

When: Tuesday, April 5, 2011 (1pm - 6pm)
Where: Microsoft: San Francisco Office (835 Market St.)
Cost: $79 
Register at: http://techdays.org/2011/03/todd-lammle/

This speaker series takes place right before the regular April PacITPros meeting, so rest up for a jam packed afternoon and evening of tech talk.

Coming Soon – DaRT 7!

This week a MMS, Microsoft announced the upcoming beta of DaRT 7, the Diagnostic and Recovery Toolkit. The beta will be out in early April and customers can sign up for the beta at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=213952.
Some of the new features to look forward to are:

• Added remote control functionality - remotely control a machine that won't even boot into Windows by using WinPE.
• Fully supported USB Boot, as well as network boot and local installation.
• Local Tool Security - restrict the locally installed tools so that they can only be used during a remote recovery request to your helpdesk.

Learn more on Springboard by checking out this Q&A with Stephen Rose and Brad McCabe on the Windows Team Blog.

Random Bits

Here a some random bits of tech info that have caught my eye recently - enjoy!

• If you've so busy you haven't had a chance to look up and have missed the news, IE 9 was released on Monday.  Check out more or download it at http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/.
• This is a bit older, but Kindle added page numbers to their e-reader in March and this post covers more about how it works.  I wasn't that bothered by the lack of them, but it's cool that it's an option for those who need them.  I have the orginal Kindle, so I won't get page numbers with my version, but eventually I'll be tempted to upgrade!
•  Going to TechEd in Atlanta this year?  Check out their new MyTechEd portal - start a discussion, check out session topics and more.

Shopping for Hard Drives? Pay Attention to Sector Sizes

Disk drive manufacturers are transitioning to the production of Advanced Format disk drives, which have 4 KB physical sector size instead of the traditional 512 bytes.  While larger sectors will ultimately improve performance, many applications are not written to take advantage of the change, so a transitional technology called "512-byte emulation" is used to support the 512 byte logical addressing.  These disks are known as "512e" disks, for short.

Advanced Format drives will ultimately be the future standard, however some applications may have issues with the transitional 512e drives, especially if you are imaging a machine to new hardware and the OS and applications aren't expecting a difference in physical and logical sector sizes.

Microsoft has a hotfix available for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 than can address several potential issues introduced with this type of disk.  Check out KB 982018 for additional details and several known issues.  I'd be particularly aware if you are doing any P2P migrations of servers that support Active Directory, DHCP or act as a CA, as the ESENT engine is sensitive to the reporting of sector size, as detailed in issue #1 of the knowledge base article.