Why Scan Large-Format Documents?

Having documents saved on computer gets rid of the time and effort of searching for documents in flat drawers, hanging files and tubes. It protects your drawings from damage due to regular handling and copying.  You can view a “better than the original” image on your computer. You can print or email  oversize documents directly from your desktop once they have been scanned, and there is no need for photocopying and snail mail.  You can share complete sets of large-format documents easily and quickly. And you reduce office space requirements by cutting down on the amount of paper filing space you need.

Scanning your drawings and other oversize documents ensures that critical information is preserved and becomes accessible by all authorized parties. When architects, engineering firms and construction companies no longer have the worry, inefficiency and expense of managing large format documents in paper form, they can focus more on their core businesses of designing and building.

Large-Format Scanning for All Needs

Facility managers, architects, engineers, construction companies and others rely on large-format scanning services to help them better manager:

• Engineering drawings
• Blueprint drawings
• Architectural renderings
• Circuit diagrams
• Topographic maps
• Other large format drawings

Large-Format Scanning Services

Depending upon the company you use and the scanners they use, you should be able to see some of these benefits from using a scanning service:

• Background noise cleanup
• Advanced image enhancement
• Image rotation for optimal viewing
• De-skewing
• Output to Tiff, PDF and other file formats
• Project-specific indexing for quick and easy retrieval

Companies that offer large-format scanning use professional equipment and software to improve the quality of the images they capture. They have operators who have been trained to handle large-format documents quickly and efficiently. You can arrange for the originals to be stored off-site once scanned, or returned to you for you to dispose of.

How Large a Document Size Can Be Scanned?

If you think your document is too big to scan, consider this. The Colortrac SmartLF Gx+ 56 Series range scans documents up to 56 inches wide.  It uses special technology to eliminate creases or other poor original qualities, and some models can scan in color. It can scan a full size color image and present it on your PC screen with the same colors as the original. Ideal for reworking and reprinting.

Hackworth Large Document Scanning

Hackworth not only sells large-format scanners to its customers, but we can also scan your documents for you. If you want to know more about this type of scanning, contact us today. Our specialists will be happy to discuss your options with you. Contact us at 757-545-7675 or hri@hackworth.co.

The post Streamlining Facility & Construction Documents Via Scanning appeared first on Hackworth.

A secondary reason is to provide backup to current business activities. For example, accounts personnel can only reconcile bank statements if there are records to support the transactions shown on a statement.

Then there is customer service – a business certainly wants to retain customer records to ensure it treats its customers effectively.

Some companies end up with millions of pages of old paper archives. There are companies that specialise in storing paper archives in safe locations, such as inside temperature-controlled caves.

One of the main problems with holding large archives of paper is finding a particular document. Unless paper records are organised extremely efficiently, and everyone always puts them back exactly as they found them, there are real chances of losing some of it as time passes.

Is there a solution to this ever-present problem? Yes: document scanning.

Some businesses have taken the steps of scanning their paperwork. The scanned documents are stored on computers just like any other data files and these can be backed up safely. Each scanned document can be indexed with one or more keywords that can be used later on to search for particular documents.

Some document-image-processing systems (DIPs) are implemented with the aim of cutting down stored paperwork from the very beginning.  New correspondence is scanned as soon as it is arrived, is indexed, and then forwarded across the computer network to the relevant people. The original papers can be discarded as soon as they are scanned correctly.

It is also practical, if lengthy, to implement DIPs to replace an existing document archive with a computer-based one. Where there are millions of pages in an archive, it will take a long time to scan everything. But the benefits of doing this are immense:

• DIPs give users access to documents on their PC screens. They don’t have to traipse to the archive store, fill in a request for a particular set of documents and wait for them to be returned from offsite storage. The documents are available online, usually immediately.
• DIPs allow several people to read a document simultaneously, even in different offices. After all, that document is only a computer file, so it can be shared.
• DIPs introduce security, backups, to paper records in a way that can’t be repeated easily using only paper. Any competent DIPs will have a backup service installed to keep its data safe.
• Some DIPs use character-recognition technology to convert the scanned page into useful, searchable text. This can reduce the size of the resulting scanned document considerably compared to saving it as an image. But it also means that the document content becomes more useful to the business.

Modern document scanning can transform document archiving into a useful business resource that is immediately available to many users.

The post How Document Scanning Is Transforming Legacy Archiving appeared first on Hackworth.

“One out of two of businesses never return to the marketplace following a major disaster. Of those that do, half go bankrupt within three years.” Source: Chubb Insurance

Does this worry you? It should. These companies couldn’t have had a proper “disaster recovery plan”.  Such a plan helps you to put in place measures you need in order to stay operational in the event of a disaster.  Disaster recovery focuses on the IT systems that support business functions, compared to “business continuity” which involves planning for keeping all aspects of a business functioning despite disruptive events.

Many parts of the USA, and a number of other countries, have recently experienced harsh weather conditions. Some of these involved a lot of rain and/or snow with driving winds.  If your business premises became waterlogged, how would you manage to continue trading? What about your computer data or records – would they still be available in the event of a water-based disaster?

Preparing for potential future disasters need not be daunting. The first things to consider are the sorts of disasters you think might affect your business and its premises. Then you need to consider how you would overcome these disasters, and put in place some safeguards for your IT systems, to help mitigate the disasters.

If you are a small business, you might be located in a single office with a network server and several desktop PCs connected by a network. Part of your planning for disasters should be to ensure that the company data on the server and the desktop PCs is regularly backed up and that the backup media are kept safely stored outside of the office. If the building burns down, the backups physically located next to the server would be useless as they will be ruined. Fireproof safes are not infallible. If the backups are stored away from your normal place of work, it will help you to set up operations in a new location.

Some businesses buy stand-by equipment that can be rolled out if the main equipment gets damaged or destroyed in day-to-day use. Other businesses contract with specialist disaster recovery companies to supply replacement servers, etc., in the event of a disaster – with the replacement timetable being agreed before disaster strikes. What you choose to do depends upon the services available in your area, and whether or not you have the staff to cope with emergency server replacements.

Think about potential disasters before they occur and how to overcome them, and write up notes on the actions required to resolve these disasters – all of this helps you formulate your disaster recovery plan.

One final suggestion: do test any plan you come up with to ensure that it works. It could be fatal to your business to assume you are ready for a disaster, only to find out at the crunch time that you AREN’T as ready as you thought.

Hackworth offers a full array of IT solutions including back up & data recovery, remote network management, computer hardware support and much more. Contact us for a free IT consultation or for more information: 757-545-7675.

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How Portable Scanners Work

Portable scanners come in two different variants: very small computer scanners and fully-detached scanners.

The small computer scanners can be cheaper, but they need to be connected to a computer in order to work. That makes them less portable, as you’ll also need to carry some sort of mobile device with you and probably at least a tablet-sized device so you can check image quality without zooming in and out too much.

The fully-detached portable scanners don’t require any external connections to scan, although most of them do require an additional storage card (usually an SD card) which adds to their cost. With these, you scan the photograph or document and download it to your computer later.

Some portable scanners of both types have a small one-page feed mechanism so you can insert a page, press the scan button, and it will pull the page over the imager. This guarantees a good scan but limits the maximum size document you can scan.

Other portable scanners, mostly of the fully-detached type, require you manually wave or roll the scanner over the page. This can create distortions if you don’t move the scanner in a straight line, but there’s also a benefit: if you use special software after downloading the image to your computer (called photo stitching software), you can combine several scans of different parts of the same large document or poster into a single full-sized image.

The Convenience Trade-Off

Fully-detached portable scanners would seem to be the most convenient. They’re typically only about 9 inches wide (slightly wider than an 8.5-inch letter-sized sheet) and about an inch thick and an inch tall, so they’ll fit in backpacks, daypacks, briefcases, and even some larger purses.

They don’t require you carry a computer, but this is also their downside. Because you can’t preview the image after scanning it, there’s a chance you’ll get back home or to your office and discover you made a bad scan—which may mean that you’ll need to go back and scan the document again.

Computer scanners require that computer or tablet connection, but if you already have a small netbook or tablet that you carry with you often, this doesn’t add much of a burden.

Who Should Use A Portable Scanner, And Who Can Use An Alternative

Professional and amateur researchers are the target market for portable scanners, particularly people who need to scan public records or library reference material.

If you frequently visit the same research location and don’t have tight deadlines, you may find it more convenient to carry a fully-detached scanner—after all, if you make a bad scan, you can always rescan the document the next time you’re researching.

But if you can’t easily rescan your document—such as going to a foreign country to research genealogy records—you should probably use a portable computer scanner to ensure you make high-quality scans.

On the other hand, if you aren’t planning any real research, you can use a trick I’ve used when traveling—use your digital camera or camera-equipped mobile device to make a pseudo-scan. Just put the page on a flat surface, hold your photographic device over it, and snap photos until you get a good one.

To make it look like a legitimate scan, you may need to open the file in a photo editor and trim the borders a bit. This whole process takes quite a bit longer than using either type of portable scanner, but it saves you from having to carry a scanner with you on non-research trips.

The post How Useful Are Small Portable Scanners? appeared first on Hackworth.

Right?

Well, maybe not. A specialized device sold to thousands of elementary schools across the United States for over a decade could be the answer.

The Alphasmart: A Digital Typewriter

Children need to learn how to type and compose using computers, but until recently, laptops were too fragile and cost too much to give to grade-school age children. So over a decade ago, a company created a solution: the Alphasmart.

The Alphasmart is a very basic computer. There have been a few different models over the years, but must models have had only two visible parts: a keyboard and a four to six line monochrome LCD screen.

Unlike a laptop, the keyboard and the screen are held together with a solid (non-hinged) piece of thick plastic, making the Alphasmart extremely robust. It will certainly survive a fall to the ground from any typical drop height.

Text Processing Only

As a basic computer, the Alphasmart only really does one thing: text processing. I say text processing because it does not even do what you probably think of as word processing—you can’t format text with bold or italics, create headings, or type anything besides letters, numbers, spaces, and punctuation.

There’s also no Internet, no apps (except a calculator), no wavy red spell check lines, and nothing else to distract you from writing.

There’s not even a regular operating system. You press the on button and it displays your document within two seconds. You don’t have to save anything either; you just press the off button and your document is automatically saved (or you can wait 5 minutes and it will save your document and turn off automatically).

Battery Life

But perhaps the most interesting feature of the Alphasmart is how it’s powered. Your laptop might give you 5 hours of life on its specialized battery. Your mobile phone and tablet might let you use them for 10 or 15 hours. But the latest version of the Alphasmart gets an incredible 300 hours of working time on a single set of batteries—and months in standby (powered off) mode.

Better yet, keeping spare batteries for the Alphasmart is easy—all it takes is three standard AA batteries, so you can write your manuscript on a deserted island with nothing but your Alphasmart and a few spare batteries.

Getting Your Data To Your Computer

The Alphasmart is compatible with practically any computer—Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, and more. The trick is how it transfers data. Instead of requiring that you install fancy data transfer software, it simply pretends to be an extra keyboard.

You connect it to your computer by USB, open up a new document or text editor, and press the Send key on the Alphasmart. At roughly 1,000 words per minute, the Alphasmart retypes your file into the document on your computer. Although this can take several minutes if you have a long document, you can walk away and do something else while it transfers.

Limitations And How To Get One

Although the Alphasmart is great for writing, its tiny screen and lack of formatting makes editing difficult and typesetting practically impossible. It also has a memory limit (varying by model) of about 64,000 words. If you want to write more than that, you’ll have to transfer data to your computer and clear the Alphasmart’s memory.

Renaissance Learning, the company which currently makes the Alphasmart, sells them directly to writers for about $120, but this isn’t the best deal. Because Renaissance Learning also sells them to schools in bulk and the schools occasionally get rid of them in bulk, it’s very easy to buy a used current-model Alphasmart for about $35 plus shipping or a used older-model Alphasmart for less than $20 plus shipping, making it an excellent investment in actually getting around to writing your next book.

The post How A $25 Kids Toy Can Help You Write A 64,000-Word Book (But Not A Word Longer) appeared first on Hackworth.

If you only had a few thousand documents scanned, it’s easy enough to load the image of every document into a image thumbnail program and skim through them 20 images at a time during your lunch break, but what if you have tens of thousands of scanned documents—or more?

Get Your Computer To Read Your Documents

If you used a document services company or you’re familiar with scanning technology, you’ve probably heard of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) programs which can read printed text with accuracy rates exceeding 99%. Your document services company may have tried to upsell you OCR services as part of your scanning contract as a way to add a searchable index to your documents. Whether or not you bought the upgrade, you can use OCR yourself to test your scanned documents.

OCR software can create a text-only version of an image if that image has any text. Some OCR software is totally automatic, so it can create those text versions of each page on your computer overnight while you sleep. (For millions of pages, you might need to dedicate a computer to the task for several days or weeks.)

Many OCR programs you see for sale have point-and-click user interfaces which let you select which documents to process, but there are a number of command-line or scriptable OCR programs which don’t have a graphical user interface. These OCR programs are easy for programmers and system administrators to integrate into other programs, and that’s exactly what you need—a program to read your scanned documents.

How the Document Auto Verifier Works & How To Build It

Any programmer and any senior system administrator can write a super simple program which does an easy job:

1. Uses a command-line OCR program to create a text version of a scanned document image.
2. Checks to see how many English words are in the text version.
3. Makes a note in a log if the text version has too few words. (A better way is to make a copy of the image version into a special folder for easy review.)
4. Starts over on the next image.

If the OCR program finds a lot of words in a document, the document was probably scanned well. If it doesn’t find a lot of words, the scanned image may have a problem—it could be blank, it could be unrecognizable, or the image file could be damaged. (You might also not have a problem—the scanned document could’ve been a picture or blank form.)

The best news is that this process doesn’t need to cost you anything except for the hour it takes your system administrator to set it up and the time you (or your assistant) spends analyzing the log of problem images. That’s because, thanks to Google, one of the best command-line OCR programs is open source software—in other words, it’s free.

Tell your system administrator to search for Tesseract OCR—the program Google uses to scan millions of books for Google Books—and get proof your documents were accurately scanned.

For more information on scanning large and format documents, contact our experts in the Production Department at 757-545-7675 or production@hackworth.co.

The post How To Automatically Verify Your Bulk Scan Job Scanned Correctly appeared first on Hackworth.

Types Of Digital Document Signatures

There’s a lot of confusion about digital document signatures and what exactly they mean. I see three common different uses of the phrase:

1. Scanned copies of manual signatures which you can copy and paste into a document. Then you can print the document as a PDF to create what looks like a scanned signed document. These offer no security, but they’re awfully convenient for virtually signing documents while on the road.
2. Document management systems which let you mark a document as signed. For example, many electronic health information management (medical record) programs let doctors mark orders and reports as signed. Most of these signatures only provide as much security as the integrity of the system’s database—if someone can tamper with the database, they can forge signatures. (But, note, some document management systems integrate with the following type of digital signature.)
3. Cryptographic digital signatures which use a mathematical formula to create an altered version of a document which guarantees that a particular person with a particular electronic key created that version of the document.

How Cryptographic Digital Signatures Work

Cryptographic signatures all use a mathematical formula open to the public, although you need to be a math expert to understand it. There are a few different systems, each one with a different formula, but they all work in the same basic way.

First, the formula creates a unique identification number based on the entire contents of the document you want to sign. This number is usually called a hash by programmers. Then the formula looks for a second piece of information, called a key, and uses it to transform the hash into a signed hash.

The magic is in the key. Mathematical principles show that there are some operations that are easier to perform in one direction than in the other. For example, find the square of 6. Now find the square root of 49. Which took you longer? It was probably the square root. Although modern computers can square and square root numbers at roughly the same speed, there are certain advanced math operations which they can do quickly one way, but which take forever to do in the opposite direction.

Cryptographic keys exploit that fact to create a key with two sides—a public side and a private side. When the cryptographic formula signs a document, it uses the private side of your key—that’s the easy part of the formula. When someone wants to verify that you signed the document, you give them the public side of your key—that’s the hard part of the formula. They can use the public key to verify that you signed the document, but it would take them millions of dollars of computer processing power to be able to do all the math required to use your public key to forge your signature.

What Cryptographic Digital Signatures Mean For You

The U.S. military uses cryptographic keys to sign almost all of their emails, and an increasing number of document management solutions which require absolutely impossible-to-forge documents (such as legal orders) are increasingly implementing cryptographic signatures. It’s highly likely that, as document and contract management becomes increasingly digital, cryptographic digital signatures will be more and more used.

The post How Digital Document Signatures Work And Why They Can’t Be Faked appeared first on Hackworth.

The Problem With Live Collaborative Document Editing

Businesses have been doing collaborative document editing since ancient times. Work is simply divided up between different authors, each author writes his or her piece, and the pieces are assembled by an editor who smooths out differences in tone and style.

Online document editing doesn’t change that system, although many new businesses without experience in offline collaborative editing may not think to clearly partition work, leading authors to inadvertently write some duplicate content or fail to write some other content. But with good project management, online document editing should work at least as smoothly as older offline document editing.

The problem which comes up is distraction: as multiple authors work on a document at the same time in an online system, the desire to watch other the other writers at work can be at times overwhelming. For many people, writing requires solitude and concentration, which is one thing live online collaborative document editing does not provide.

You Always Make More Typos When People Watch You

Have you ever had your boss stand behind you while you tried to type something on your computer. Somehow, magically, your 20-years of touch-typing skill disappears and your fingers turn to all thumbs. As you make typo after typo, you get embarrassed, and the situation gets even worse.

Live document editing lets anyone else on your shared document watch you work. It’s the equivalent of having not just your boss stand over your shoulder, but also your entire workgroup. And, worse, writing isn’t the same as typing. Everyone knows the first draft of a document is usually bad, but what your online audience is seeing is pre-first draft. They’re watching as you pause for 30 seconds to think of a synonym, or as you delete the previous sentence because it didn’t work, or as you misspell some common word with some silly rule you never memorized (“there’s ‘a rat’ in separate”).

Writing is hard enough when nobody can see your mistakes; it’s nearly impossible when you’re worried about other people watching you.

The Solution To Online Document Editing Problems

Some collaborative editing apps have the ability to turn off live editing, although (disturbingly) some don’t have this option and call it’s absence a feature. But there’s also a really simple way to get back to the old style of collaborative document editing: simply create your document offline in Microsoft Office or as a personal document in your online productivity suite and then, after you finish writing and editing your part, copy and paste it into the shared online document.

As long as you can convince your boss that you’re working even though he can’t see you typing, writing documents “offline” protects your privacy and probably boost your productivity, and it also saves you from teasing from your co-workers because you don’t know how to spell seperate—I mean separate.

The post Collaborative Online Document Editing: Is It Really Useful? appeared first on Hackworth.

1. Keep Your Data Organized

The first step to effective data management is to keep it organized. Many companies simply dump data in storage spaces, data centers or in folders which can quickly get unorganized. Dealing with a mismanaged or unmanaged database can be troublesome, time consuming and a very tedious exercise when one has to access such data. Organizing data starts with very basic practices. When you name the files or folders of data, have a system in place. Some companies always name them in one word, in lower case without any spaces. Some companies use block characters and also use spaces to segregate different words while naming the files. Both are acceptable systems provided the company has uniformity across the board. Having two naming systems or more can be confusing and will not help to have efficient data management. Likewise, similar files or data should be stored in specific folders or places and there should be a system of storing different types of data in accordance to that.

2. Ensure Security at Various Levels

There is a need to have multi-tier security in data management. One has to ensure physical security of the database or datacenter so that not everyone can access it physically. There has to be sturdy network security and the systems used to store the data should also be robustly secured against any ingrown or external threats in any form.

3. Take Regular Backup

Data backup is crucial to any data management strategy. Regular backup is mandatory. How the data is backed up is also important. If data is lost, how easy is it to restore so that the business is operational? Tape backup is notorious for its arduous restore process. The latest backup and recovery operations available make this process much easier.

4. Make Data Accessible

While data should be kept secured, making the required data easily accessible is also an integral part of data management. The main database may remain inaccessible but the data that is required every now and then should be at the disposal of the employees or the concerned staffs.

5. Have a Core Data Management Team

Every company should have a very small, core data management team. Too many people involved with the process will make it complicated, perplexing and also less secured. If there are processes that are beyond the business’s skill level then this may require working with outside companies prepared to help with the management of the data.

For more information on how to effectively manage your data contact one of our data experts at 800-676-2424.

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Case in point – if you have been keeping up with recent technology news, you would have heard about big name companies such as Apple and Adobe having major data and security issues. Hackers such as the infamous group Anonymous, take social and political justice into their own hands as they see fit. These hackers and others target large companies who store millions of users’ data to make a statement. The right data backup solution will provide security for your data by preventing this kind of attacks with the use of encryption and other security techniques.

GoDaddy is another big name in the news due to hardware failure that left millions unable to access their websites. Anyone that has ever owned a computer for any length of time knows that a computer will fail. Hardware failure can be very frustrating because you can end up losing everything on your computer or network. No one wants to lose their valuable data. This is another very important reason to look into the correct data backup system because items like financial records, pictures, videos, and other documents crucial to your business cannot be left susceptible with an inferior solution.

You never really understand how important your hard drive is until something happens to it. Think about everything that you save on that hard drive. If you have a business, you understand that everything vital to your company is kept on a hard drive. What if something happens and that hard drive fails? Data backup can protect everything that is vital to your business. With a viable data backup solution, you can get lost data restored instantly back to your computer.

Anyone can lose data at any time and in a variety of ways. If you think about everything you have saved on your computer or network, then you can understand what losing that data could do to your business. In this day and age, hackers are trying their best to break into systems to steal data or simply to make a statement. Hardware will continue to fail at the most inopportune times. Your data is very important to you and your business, and it should be protected at all costs.

For more information on how to effectively protect your mission critical data, contact Corey Wilt at 800-676-2424.

The post Anyone Can Lose Data at Anytime appeared first on Hackworth.

Time savings and cost savings alone pay for the critical tool of project information management provided by MySmartPlans (MSP). This software-as-a-service (SaaS) is how everything is coordinated, collaborated, planned and so much more. It also covers distribution, and it affects every crew member from the offices to the ground. It is the brains behind the muscle, and without it you could experience unnecessary management challenges.

Everyone from government entities to general contractors is utilizing this fundamental tool. PIM software has much to offer regardless of the scale of the project or budget that is required. It streamlines communication, drives accountability, promotes transparency, creates accountability, ensures the projects transparency, compresses time frames and it even improves sub contractor’s performances. With MSP your information quality and access to facilities management data is the best in the industry.

If you need to accelerate the project’s life-cycle, provide 2D or 3D collaboration, manage compliance or do an audit trial then project information management will be beneficial to you. It does all of this and more. In today’s competitive construction industry it gives you an advantage that will separate you from your competition. It adds quality to your service, and accountability to everyone involved in a project.

Being environmentally conscious is essential in business today, and MySmartPlans is doing their part, as well. MSP has modernized the revolutionary paper reduction act with the management process. Online collaboration as well as the project management technologies have positively impacted things like agriculture, the construction fields and even engineering just to name a few. Trees are not needlessly cut down, metal filing cabinets are not needed, space is not taken in land fields and so forth. This is excellent avenue to have a positive impact on the environment with real results.

MSP connects everyone involved in the entire project from the top to the bottom. The lines of communication are clear and open. It brings together the owners, the architects, the general contractors and sub-contractors so that the job is executed with as few delays and interruptions in communication as possible.

“Having MySmartPlans as our project information management tool for construction of the new Kellam High School has been invaluable. It allows for outstanding transparency and open communication between all parties involved in the project.”

Anthony L. Arnold, PE
Director of Facilities Planning and Construction
Virginia Beach City Public Schools

The post Project Information Management Software: Don’t Do Construction Without It appeared first on Hackworth.

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You need to protect your business data. Data backup and data recovery are important parts of running a business. Business owners realize three things quickly: all computer systems crash; all humans error; and disasters happen when least expected or are least prepared for them. A business can be more prepared with having data backup systems in place. These data backup systems are accomplished by either by using an offsite server or using separate drives to store massive amounts of information. Without these data backup systems in place, data recovery becomes a perilous situation where many businesses lose information when the worst happens.

Offsite servers are useful for data recovery as they provide massive amounts of storage for nominal prices especially when comparing the hassle it saves in the event of an information disaster. Having a safe place to put information off of the main business server can prove to be more relieving action in the long run. Data recovery is usually painless. In the rare case where these offsite servers crash usually the offsite servers have backed up the information further onto their own drives. To use an offsite server to protect your business data is one of the more effective methods to keep information safe.

Another effective data backup system is to invest in independent storage drives. Terabyte drives are relatively inexpensive if purchased from discount stores or from high volume stores. Data recovery is easy from these drives as they are basically plug and play. Multiple storage volumes are available from half a terabyte, one terabyte, two terabytes and for the big spenders three or more terabyte drives. Depending on the kinds of data necessary to keep the business running a daily data backup may be necessary. If the data is financial this is almost a certainty. These external drives are invaluable in the need to protect your business data.

Both offsite storage and external drive storage are potential necessities. Which is better is entirely determined upon the business being run. Data backup and data recovery work basically the same way. The real consideration is whether the data storage is needed to be long term or short term and if the short term will cost more than the long term. For offsite storage it is likely to provide more storage, but for recurring payments. For external drive storage it is a one time charge (unless the drive somehow crashes). In the end it is up to you to protect your business data.

We can help you with your questions about which solution is best suited for you. Talk to your Regional Manager or call us today at 800.676.2424.

The post The Importance of Data Backup appeared first on Hackworth.

Susan, an employee of a major insurance company, clicked on her email at work to open a cute home video her friend Debbie sent. That 20mb video file was then stored in her email and, at the end of the day, was diligently backed up by her company’s data storage solution.

Just one year later after daily backups of Susan’s email, that one video now takes up 7300 MB of space!

The incredible growth in the amount of electronic data generated for both business and personal use has resulted in higher costs for data storage and backup. Several factors have lead to these spiraling cost increases, including storage of larger files such as video and audio, multiple backups of the same files, and enforcement of industry compliance regulations. How often is your company backing up duplicate data over the course of a year?

With the exponential increase in the storage of email, video, mp3 files and other large sized files, business storage needs have grown accordingly. In addition to backing up business information, company computers often end up as the de facto backup for personal music, videos and email, resulting in additional backup storage costs for businesses.

Currently, 75% of documents are stored in email. In 2008 alone, more than 210 billion emails were sent. Backing up the same email attachments sent to different people in the same organization results in increased storage requirements, costs and time for backups.

3 Ways to Control Costs

Using outdated backup methods or limiting your company to tape storage and backup will increase your costs, rather than reduce them. Instead, look for a solution that provides the flexibility and technology that will help you maximize cost savings. Implementing the following cost management techniques may help optimize your storage and backup strategy.

1. Reduce duplication of data
   Increase the speed of your backup operations and reduce storage costs by eliminating the duplication of data and backing up only new and changed data blocks. With tape backup systems and most disk-based backup systems, the same data is often backed up multiple times, resulting in higher data storage needs and an increased storage footprint. By eliminating duplicate data and only backing up the block-level daily changes, less data storage is needed. In addition, the ability to quickly recover data in the case of a disaster will eliminate unnecessary downtime and risk of data loss.
2. Implement flexible data retention policies and schedules
   Flexible retention policies and schedules allow you to determine the appropriate retention time based on the type of data being stored. By setting and managing retention schedules, you control the amount of data you store. For example, Sarbanes Oxley Sec. 802(a) requires that audit or review work papers be retained for a period of five years. This is likely a longer period of time than you might keep non-financial data.
   In addition to length of time, a system that provides the flexibility of different policies for different file types can also assist a company in avoiding storing employees’ personal files such as video files or mp3 files during backup sessions. Eliminating or reducing the amount of time a type of file is saved, especially large video and audio files, can provide significant cost savings.
3. Use one system that works with multiple platforms
   Companies have implemented multiple platforms and applications across different types of servers, operating systems and databases. These organizations are often forced to deploy multiple backup systems to handle each separate platform type. The maintenance time and costs for these systems can really pile up. Having one backup system that can work across different platforms saves time and money, while reducing the complexity of managing and maintaining multiple data storage systems.

For more information on how to reduce the costs of you data backup methods, contact your Regional Manager or call us at 757-545-7675.

*Information supplied by EVault.

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Reliability.

Up to 71% of restores from tape contain failures.

Best Practice: Use disk-to-disk technology for backups. With disk-to-disk technology, your backup data resides on disk drives, proven to be far more reliable than tapes. When your backup completes, you know the data is secure and accessible on the disk drive. With tapes you never really know if your data is usable until you try to restore it, at which point it’s too late.

Breadth of Offering.

Choice in product and service offerings meet your business’ needs.

Best Practice: Don’t settle for less than what you need. Vendor offerings vary widely. Some are designed primarily for consumers and others for enterprise data centers. Choose a solution that scales (see scalability below), and offers the features you need to provide the level of service you expect. De-duplication and delta-block technologies will improve performance, reduce your data footprint and save you money. Find out if their de-duplication offering is at the file level or the block level. Make sure the solution can back up servers, PCs, and laptops as well your applications.

Security.

60% of organizations using tapes don’t encrypt their backups.

Best Practice: End-to-end encryption with no “back door.” Using encryption with tape makes backups run slowly and often takes too long to fit within a backup window. As a result, most people simply turn encryption off, creating a security risk. Even with the physical safety of disk-todisk backup, encryption is essential. Look for 256-bit AES. Find a solution that encrypts your data during transmission and storage. Make certain there isn’t a “back door” that would let someone else view your data.

Accessibility.

Companies waste thousands of hours waiting on tapes.

Best Practice: Ensure that you can get your data back with minimal delay. You should have direct access to your backups, with no time spent on physical transport (no trucks, no warehouses). Your restores should take minutes, not hours or days. Set yourself up to work with your data, not wait for it. Make sure your solution provider can meet your Return-to-Operations (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) which determine how quickly you can recover your
data and maintain business continuity. Inquire about onsite and offsite replication that provide both improved performance and a solid disaster recovery strategy.

For more information on data backup and recovery best practices call me at 757.646.1529.

Information supplied by EVault.

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Hackworth’s booth centered around MySmartPlans and it’s ability to enhance the real estate industry’s project information management.

Regional Sales Manager, Drew Little had this to say, “Kyllie Brinkley and the team at CREED put on another great event this year. We were proud do be a part of the Market Review for the third year in a row.”

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