Well tonight is a timely reminder of the importance of a UPS and a surge protected power supply on your critical computer equipment. When running RAID on server equipment and Network attached storage devices its important that the equipment is shutdown in a graceful manner in the event of a storm.

Just recently a new customer of mine had their Raid controller corrupt the data due a loss of power during a write operation on the raid. Being a cheap server the raid controller didn’t have battery cache either so it was  a case of rebuild and restore from backup.

After the customer had to invest a significant amount of money for a complete SBS 2008 build and a new server I advised the customer what can be done to prevent such an issue occurring again in the future.

The first step I would recommend is to get a quality power board with surge protection.  The next step is to get a smart UPS. For small servers such as the HP ML110 you can get away with a smart UPS for around $220. You should configure the UPS which will plug into the server via USB to shut down the server if the UPS has been running on batteries for more than 10 minutes. This way if the power goes out you can have a piece of mind that the server will shut down gracefully.

The power board should be plugged into mains power and the UPS into the power board. So if the building cops a zap of lighting then the only thing that dies is the power board which is replaceable.

There's nothing new about Robo Copy or Robo Copy Gui for that matter. But its just such a usefull tool I thought I would blog about it. Basically after a  server failure last year I have progressively moved all my internal infrastructure to the cloud (email/call system/billing). There are only two services left to move to the cloud storage of company data and a windows voip pbx.

As a temporary interim measure for backups before some external hdd are purchased I decided to use Robo Copy Gui to mirror my data drive located on the NAS to another piece of hardware.

With Roby Copy Gui I wrote the script in less then 2 minutes and schedule windows to run the script out side of business hours. If you want to download Robo Copy you can get it from here.

After much research and investigation A & S Tech decided some time ago to use Synology as its preferred network attached storage solution. The DS410J provides a large set of features as well as well good performance for small business. With a RRP of $450 this device has been snapped up by most customers either looking for a dumping ground for data or a place that backups can be easily stored and retrieved from.

A & S Tech engineers have been using the NAS with 4 x 2 TB disk drives in conjunction with Acronis backup for Small Business Server. Backing up your critical data has never been so easy.

Basically Acronis is installed on the server and backs up a full image backup to the NAS device on the Friday night each day a differential backup is taken and dumped out to the Synology NAS.

Off site backups are also taken care of. All that's required there is three external hdd drives. The synology NAS has the smarts to backup a particular folder to an external hdd directly plugged into the back of the nas. So each day a staff member brings in an external hdd caddy plug's it into the NAS and the NAS will copy the data from backup folder to the external hdd overwriting the previous backup stored on the hdd caddy.

I have found this solution to be great for small businesses and it does not cost an arm and leg to implement either.