Offsite Backup – Be Very careful who you deal with!
The concept of offsite data backup is not new; some time ago it was only
available to corporate institutions that had multiple locations, high
connectivity speeds and very high budgets. Today the cost of hardware and high
speed connectivity has greatly reduced, as a result the number of companies
offering backup to a remote location has greatly increased. For purposes of
conversation, we can call it jumping on the band wagon.
You may think the increased competition is good for the consumer, to an
extent, I agree, but not at the cost of cutting corners and jeopardising the
security of your data. We all know and agree a company's data is its most
important asset, and to lose or give access to your competition such an asset is
never an option. So please be careful where you store your data.
The general idea of offsite backup is a good one, after all it has a very low
proportionate implementation cost and as the correct system should be completely
automated the cost of ownership is also very low as well. Unlike tape backup it
is also very scalable, you can start small and grow into larger solutions as and
when you require with zero disruption but you have to be with the right offsite
backup company in the first place.
In today's data centric environment even smaller companies may have more than
one server, just for example a server for Microsoft Exchange/Lotus Notes, a
server for Microsoft SQL/Oracle/MySQL and potentially a file and print server,
or maybe a single server which carries out all tasks. Smaller companies may
still use older inherited Unix based or Novell based systems or may be
considering migrating to a lower cost Linux environment. Whet ever you currently
use or what you may use in the future your offsite backup solution will need to
adapt. Please check, what ever backup company you use, make sure they are always
developing their products for the future, your companies future.
Getting data to an offsite location is the easy bit, anybody can click and
drag to an ftp site, to optimise your backup and more importantly your recovery
times make sure your data is compressed locally or at source. The most important
element of any data transfer is security, make sure your data is encrypted
before it is transmitted and remains encrypted whilst in storage if this is the
case only your organisation will have access to your data.
In what environment is your data stored? There is no point just moving your
most important asset to another location, make sure it is totally safe, data
should only be backed up to a class 1 data centre with the highest security and
safety measures in place, hardware should be clustered so there is no single
point of failure within that data centre and for added security and peace of
mind the whole data centre and hardware within should be a replicated in real
time to a second location in preferably another country.
Imagine your local data backed up every night or when ever you wish to a
secure remote location in the UK and then replicated in real-time to a second
data centre in a different country.
Finally this whole process must be as efficient as possible. It must be
totally secure, fully automated ensuring your staff are focussed on revenue
generating functions, it must support open files enabling you to backup
regardless of what your systems are doing and it must be capable of incremental
backups, after all there is no point re-transmitting a file which has not been
accessed for a year.
So after reading this article I now hope it has made you think and understand
why the cheapest offsite backup solution is rarely the best.
For more information of how offsite backup can help your organisation please
visit www.perfectbackup.co.uk


Condoms for Your PC - Defragmentation
Run defrag not for safety, but for speed.
Will defragmentation protect my PC from malware? Probably not. So why do it? Do it to keep your PC running as efficiently as possible.
WHY DEFRAG - The objective of a process of "PC Maintenance Management" is to keep the PC operating efficiently with minimal disruption. A part of that process is to keep the data well organized on your PC's disk drive(s). One way to do that is to run the defragmentation utility that is a part of the Windows operating system. It reorganizes files and gives you the fastest access possible while ensuring that you do a minimal number of reads and writes as a result of the defragmentation process.
HOW OFTEN SHOULD YOU DEFRAG - In a 2005 article, "Is Daily Defragmentation Needed in Today's Environment," Enterprise Software International (makers of Diskeeper(r)) concluded from a four week test that the answer is that disks should be defragmented daily.
SPECIAL PRIVILEGES REQUIRED - The defragmentation program DOES require administrative privileges under Widows XP (not Windows 2000) and, therefore, can be run only from an account, which has administrative privileges. It is found under Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools. You can run it by double-clicking its icon. In the article, "Condoms for Your PC - Accounts and Passwords," I suggested that, while you must have such an account, you should do your normal work in an account with lower privileges. That means you either need to log into the account with administrative privileges or you need to do a "run as" (with administrative privileges) from your current account.
WHAT ELSE - It is a good idea to run a disk cleanup before you run a disk defrag. You will reduce the files that are on the disk to be defragmented and regain some additional disk space. While you can run the disk defragmentation and do other processes at the same time, you should avoid doing so - particularly if you are writing to or deleting from the disk. If you start the defragmentation process and realize that you need to pause or stop the process, you can do so without damage to the process or your data. Restart it at a later time.
SUMMARY - The better job you do of PC maintenance, the better performance you can expect and the safer your PC will be from malware. Run a disk cleanup and a disk defragmentation frequently.
This article contains suggestions for the use of utility programs under the Windows operating system. They are based on years of use, but they may not be the right suggestions for you and your PC environment. Before you follow any technical suggestion, be sure that you have a current (and tested) backup of all system and data files and that you can restore the system if necessary. You are welcome to contact me if you encounter a problem, but I assume no responsibility for your actions and/or use of the information provided and disclaim any legal responsibility for any negative results of such actions.
Copyright 2006 by Tim Flynt. All rights reserved.


Retro Revisited: Chaotix Review
Sega's Megadrive 32X. Hands up if you remember it. Now hands up if you ever owned one. My condolences to the two of you.
The 32X came about at a time when Sega, after living upon a tower of extreme complacency for the past few years, found the Megadrive's 16 bit rule was coming to an end with frightening announcements of Playstations, Jaguars and other 32 bit powered hardware.
A department of Sega Japan, in conjunction with Sega of America, were ordered to design a 32 bit add-on for the Megadrive, and this would become the 32X. Bizarrely, however, another section of Sega Japan were also working on what would eventually become the Saturn – a superior 32-bit CD format. Interestingly, this was done in secret, completely unbeknownst to Sega of America while they beavered away on the 32X. This famously weird manoeuvre was completed in style by Sega's somewhat suicidal decision to release both consoles at roughly the very same time.
The result? The 32X, with its old-fashioned cartridge format, rather laughable operating procedure (two power supplies, an extra video cable, and even some wacky anti-magnetic clips to keep it held snugly in the Megadrive cartridge slot) and poor software support from the get go, was dead before it started - losing to the Saturn, which in turn was obliterated by the Playstation and Nintendo 64. A sad tale at the time, but an excellent proposition for retro collectors with failing cash supplies; fairly cheap to pick up, and only about six good games before you can call your collection "complete"!
Chaotix, then. The only existing 32 bit, two-dimensional Sonic game. But a Sonic game without Sonic. And a Sonic game sold on a gimmick. Initially panned at release – generally because Sonic fans wanted more Sonic, and less Knuckles – the game fell into quick obscurity helped in no small part by the short shelf life of the 32X. This is a shame because, once you look beyond its flaws, a tricky and intelligent platform adventure with a unique twist lies within.
Imagine a world in which you're permanently attached to a companion by a mysterious elastic-like band of energy. When you move, they have to follow, when you jump, they jump. A nightmarish proposition and, indeed, the very core of Chaotix's gameplay. So does it work? Hmm…sort of. When you get the hang of it, Chaotix is actually quite a wild ride.
Controlling the two characters simultaneously, bound together by one of Dr. Robotnik's evil experiments, the player must learn to use this disaster to their advantage, namely by creating tension in the link to supply momentum to run faster, clear obstacles, and progress up platforms.
The physics engine that supplies this unique style of movement was a brave endeavour by Sega, and admittedly isn't always one that pays off. The structure of the game's levels is rather different to standard Sonic fare, with everything having to be far more spaced out to allow the bouncing, spinning (often out of control) twosome to rebound around the levels. Frustration will often come by becoming stuck either above or below where you want to be, mashing the buttons desperately to make the characters gain the movement necessary to progress. Then there's the constant risk of smashing clumsily into enemies (of which there are, wisely, also a lot less than usual) and losing a large amount of rings unfairly. Careening around randomly is something you'll be spending a lot of time doing, and it's fun at first, until you actually become bent on getting somewhere and trying to collect all the Chaos Rings (this instalment's replacement for the classic Chaos Emeralds). Progress can become slow and frustrating, but after a while, when perhaps no longer judged simply as a "Sonic game", Chaotix starts to get under your skin, and makes its subtleties known. I'd never promise you that true mastery of the crazy system is possible, but you'll certainly begin to smile the first time you send your mammals speeding off in the right direction, clear a loop, kill an enemy, spin hectically through space and then make a neat, balletic landing at the level exit sign. That's Sonic to the power of two, and then some!
And then, gameplay considerations put aside, as a 32X showcase title, Chaotix is a must for any collector. The 32X's new range of colours is shown off fully, with every new level - chosen at random - taking place at a different time of day, resulting effectively in around four different colour palettes per stage (and there are about 30 of them!). This gives the game a real feeling of uniqueness on every play through. Sprite scaling is also used to hilarious effect - new powerups allow characters to shrink to a tiny size or grow into an enormous pixellated monstrosity. Then there's the bonus stage…
Placed inside a fully 3D world, your character must collect blue spheres (a la Sonic 3), but this time, running up the walls causes the tunnel to rotate with the player, creating an immensely challenging, gravity-defying experience that often ends in falling - swearing and throwing your controller across the room - out of the bottom of the tunnel. Never has a Sonic special stage required such a devilish combination of planning and reflexes.
At the end of the day, Chaotix was a brave new idea, almost well executed but just missing that extra round of playtesting (probably due to being rushed out for the console's ironically untimely release!) needed to make it a bona fide masterpiece. In addition to this failing, there were never enough people in possession of the hardware to play it, anyway.
Sega – release Chaotix on the next Sonic Compilation so the whole world can enjoy the elasticated eccentricities of this flawed, forgotten classic!
Originally posted on Retro 247 Games at http://www.retro247.co.uk
Copyright © 2006 Peter Michael Gothard
About the Reviewer:
Peter Gothard is a lifelong gamer, collector of rare and unusual Sega stuff, and eagerly anticipating the Nintendo Wii! He is just graduating in English Literature and Linguistics at the University of Manchester if you'd like to give him a job so as he can buy DarXside.