It’s easy, inexpensive, and totally worth it.

Posted by Paul Stokes

Time Machine
Every Mac comes with a fantastic program called Time Machine.  Never worry about losing your important data again.  Time Machine will automatically back up everything on your computer including photos, music, videos, documents, applications, settings, and more.  If your computers hard drive ever crashes, you can simply go back in time and recover from the day and time you choose from your Time Machine.  All Time Machine needs to back up your data is an external hard drive.

Time Machine makes an initial backup on the external hard drive and then saves every change, every hour, every day.  Set your external hard drive up and let it do all the work.  Even if your system doesn’t crash and you simply need to retrieve a file that you accidentally deleted.  You can go back and see how your computer looked on the date that you know you had the file and search to find the file across all of your backups.

External Hard Drive
An external hard drive is used to store the data of your choosing.  You can store a copy of your entire computer (Time Machine) or you can choose to copy only specific files that are important to you.  External hard drives connect to the computer by a USB cable, a Firewire cable, or some other means.  The hard drive itself is stored in a portable disk enclosure to protect it.  The enclosure will have plugs available to connect the drive to your computer.  Using an external drive can come in handy if you need to transport files to another location or if you want to take the drive with you to protect against potential fire and theft losses.

Optical Drives
Optical disk drives use laser light or electromagnetic waves to read or write data from optical discs.  The most common optical discs are CDs, DVDs, and Blue Ray Discs.  Recording to discs is typically kept to small-scale backup and distributing files.  Although the backup is solid and dependable, the process is slower and more expensive than other types of backup.

Tape Drives
Tape drives are data storage devices that reads and writes on a magnetic tape.  Unlike random access storage on a disk drive, tape drives provide sequential access storage.  This means that tape drives are slower and can spend a considerable amount of time finding any specific file or data.  They can however stream data very quickly.  So recovering lost data can be quite efficient once the desired data is found.

Remote Backup Service
Remote backup services are provided by several online companies.  These companies provide a program that collects, compresses, encrypts, and transfers the data that you would like backed up to a remote server.  Features and cost vary with these types of service depending on the amount of storage you need and features you want.

There are several advantages to remote backup.  One is having a backup offsite away from your original data helping prevent loss from theft, fire, or other disaster.  Some services offer the ability to back up files continuously as they are changed.  Another nice advantage is the user does not have to change tapes, label CD’s or perform any other hands on steps.

There are a few disadvantages you should be aware of.  Restoration can be slow depending on the available bandwidth.  Recovery must be done over the internet or from a shipped tape or disk from the location that the offsite data is stored.  The data may be unsecured or the provider could go out of business.  Broadband services may have limits on the amount of bandwidth available for large backups.

In general, remote backup services are a great option.  Look for a service that offers assistance configuring the initial backup, has continuous monitoring, sends proactive failure alerts, and offers assistance in restoring or recovering data.

Conclusion
In the end you need to educate yourself and make sure that anything digital that is important to you or your business is properly back up.  For individuals the Time Machine back up is sufficient in most cases.  We recommend any size business consult with professionals on what their best and safest solutions are.

For more information on back up strategies, contact Graphite today!

Posted by Paul Stokes

RAID stands for redundant array of independent disks and provides an increase in storage reliability due to its redundancy of back up.  RAID combines two or more hard drives into a single stand alone unit.  Multiple disks set up as a RAID are considered to be in a RAID array.  All data that is stored is distributed across multiple discs in the array but is seen by the operating system as one stand alone disk.

RAID systems utilize three key concepts, mirroring, striping, and error correction.

Mirroring is when identical data is contained on multiple disks.  Mirroring can speed up reading because the information can be retrieved from more than one spot.  Consequently mirroring can slow down writing when correct data must be confirmed in multiple locations.

Striping is when blocks of data are split across multiple disks.  This is used primarily for increasing performance.  Since the data is written in blocks to different disks it allows the data to be reconstructed from multiple disks faster than a single disk can process the same data.

Error correction is when redundant parity data is stored so problems can be detected and possibly repaired.  This process generally slows performance since the data needs to be read from multiple places as well as be compared for consistency.

RAID systems will use one or more of these key concepts to protect data.  These concepts are used on various combinations to improve reliability and increase the availability of data, protecting important data in the event of hardware failure, and sometimes to increase the speed of data input and output.

RAID in most cases should not be considered back up. The goal of RAID is to prevent you from having to retrieve your backups and avoid downtime.  RAID systems with redundancy can avoid interruption in the event one or possibly more disks in the array should fail.  Once a failure of a disk occurs, that disk is replaced and the array will automatically rebuild while the system continues to operate normally.  In some cases the system may need to be shut down during a disk swap.  If it’s important that your system stay running you will need to make sure the RAID you set up supports hot swapping.  This allows drives to be replaced without powering down the RAID.

Posted by Paul Stokes

Using shortcut commands can impact your productivity dramatically.  If you begin to use them regularly, they will become second nature and the speed you work at will increase rapidly.

Macs are growing in popularity and we want all the users out there to get the most out of their Mac.  Here is a list of useful shortcuts.  It does not include any F1-F12 shortcuts as these can vary widely depending on the keyboard and age of computer.  But these are our favorites.

Here is a quick overview of the shortcut key symbols used in this article.

⌘ = Command or Apple key is the most common modifier.

⌥ = Option or Alt.

⇧ = Shift

^ = Control. Not used as frequently but is still there.

Basic Shortcuts
This is a list of shortcuts that should be hardwired into your brain. These are usually the most commonly used. Most of the shortcuts on the list are for Finder, although a lot will work in other applications. If I wrote a list for every single application out there I would be here for ever.

⌘ + Q = Quit Program

⌘ + W = Close Window

⌘ + O = Open a file in your application

⌘ + N = New Window or New Document

⌘ + P = Print

⌘ + X = Cut

⌘ + C = Copy

⌘ + V = Paste

⌘ + S = Save

⌘ + Z = Undo

⌘ + A = Select All

⌘ + T = New Tab in Browser

⌘ + H = Hide application

⌘ + M = Minimize

⌘ + E = Eject disk

⌘ + F = Find

⌘ + Delete = Move item to Trash

⌘ + Y or Space = Quicklook

⌘ + ~ Cycles through windows in an application

⌘ + Tab = Cycles through open applications
Bonus – while “command tabbing” (⌘ + Tab), you can continue holding command and press ‘q’ to quit a running application.

Personally I use all of those shortcuts all of the time. It helps to remember them and use them. Most will come naturally over time.

Document or Text Navigation

⌘ + Up Arrow = Beginning of document
⌘ + Down Arrow = End of document
⌘ + Left Arrow = Beginning of line
⌘ + Right Arrow = End of line
⌥ + Up Arrow = Beginning of paragraph
⌥ + Down Arrow = End of paragraph
⌥ + Left Arrow = Backward one word
⌥ + Right Arrow = Forward one word

Add holding shift to any of these to select or deselect as you are navigating.

Other Shortcuts
This is the list where every other shortcut resides. Have a look through and see if there is anything which is of interest to you.

⌘ + ⇧+ 3 = Take fullscreen picture

⌘ + ⇧ + 4 = Take selected area screenshot

⌘ + ⇧ + 4 + Space = Take screenshot of window or menu

⌥ + ⌘ + Escape = Bring up Force Quit window

⌘ + Space = Spotlight search

⌘ + ` (back tick) = Cycle through applications windows

⌘ + . = Cancel operation

⌘ + ⇧ + ? = Open help
⌘ + I = Get Info

⌘ + [ = Go backwards in history in Finder

⌘ + ] = Go forwards in history in Finder

⌘ + Up Arrow = Go to previous folder in hierarchy

⌘ + Down Arrow = Open folder of file in Finder

⌘ + G = Next result in Find option

⌘ + ⇧ + Z = Redo

⌘ + ⇧ + H = Go to Home folder

⌘ + ⇧ + D = Go to Desktop

⌘ + ⇧ + C = Go to Computer

⌘ + ⇧ + K = Go to Network

⌘ + ⇧ + I = Go to iDisk

⌘ + ⇧ + A = Go to Application

⌘ + ⇧ + U = Go to Utilities

⌘ + ⇧ + G = Go to folder

Conclusion

Many of these are used in the Finder and they are very useful to learn, especially if you use a function quite frequently.

One last shortcut just for fun:  control + alt + command + 8
 it reverses all the colors

Posted by Paul Stokes

IT departments are challenged to affect many aspects of a business.  Their hope through successful IT management is to improve productivity, reduce downtime, improve morale, all in hope of increasing sales.

During tough times, when budgets are cut and spending is done with caution, the IT department can be a target of those cuts.  Management must have evidence that the investment in IT is helping the bottom line.  Outsourcing your IT department might just be the answer to saving money, time, and effort for your company.  Here are a few advantages of letting someone else worry about your IT.

Training and certification

Keeping a staff of IT professionals trained and certified can be very expensive.  It is an expense that can’t be avoided because of the importance that the IT staff be qualified to operate the company’s IT systems and equipment.  Some re-certifications are required regularly and can have substantial continual costs associated with it.

Unnecessary capital equipment and licenses

Many companies accumulate equipment and software licenses that are underutilized and many times unused.  Removing unused equipment and doing away with unnecessary licenses can cut an annual operating budget significantly.  Keeping an IT department supplied with proper equipment and licensed comes with a cost.

Conclusion

IT outsourcing can help reduce a businesses IT expenditures, but it is important to understand the cost incurred in the transition process.  There will be a transition period where costs can increase in the short term, but over the long run big savings are incurred in most cases.

Consider all of your costs including training, certifications, equipment, and licensing.  When all of the costs are added up, it might surprise you what kind of support retainer you can secure for less than half the cost of an IT department.