Importance of backups

By Nick Hortovanyi

I heard a high pitch squeal and looked at the server. No lights were flashing. Fear was starting to creep in.

This happened early Monday morning May 3, 2010 and after a little investigation and changing of power supplies I realised that the server was dead. It had, had a reasonable life, with having a motherboard and memory replacement back in 2007. But the hard drives, were a little old.

What was I going to do? I needed to recover this system as it holds my blog server (that runs this blog), main web server, dns and other software. I'd been thinking I needed to replace the hard drives and was contemplating moving everything into the cloud. But I had not gotten there as yet.

I choose the safe option, and after my first appointment, I went for a latte to wait for the computer shop to open. Yes, I purchased a new motherboard, Intel i5 CPU, new hard drives and 4GB of memory. I was praying that I could recover the system with the old drives. I'm always diligent and use two drives in a mirror, so if a single drive fails I do not loose everything.

After a little time rebuilding, I plugged the two old drives in and pressed the power button. The machines beeped at me very loudly. I'd put the second memory stick in the wrong slot. Quickly corrected that issue and tried to power up again. Everything was working fine until it got to the point of booting the Operating System. It just didn't start. I fiddled around but still no luck.

My worst fears were born true, both hard drives in the mirror were fried. One even had a puff of smoke rise as I was looking at it. At this point I was silently saying little words to myself. Thinking, did I have other backups somewhere.

I found some older backups of part of the system and was able to restore the web site and blog server but I'd lost over a years worth of blog entries. This is where I'm up to now, writing this blog entry and will need to recover my blog posts. I earlier found copies of them on facebook and through google cache for the period I needed. Now that this blogging server is back the google cache will be invalidated. So if you ever find yourself in a similar situation take copies of your blog entries, from where ever you can find them first.

Now the blogging server is back. I'll be entering in previous blog entries going back to February 2009. If you think you may be rereading entries, I apologies in advance. Please bear with me.

Once complete I'll back everything up and put it onto multiple machines. Then the next challenge will be creating a hybrid cloud solution so that I have no single point of failure again.

Tags crash server backup data   |  Comments 0

Getting off of SaaS

By Nick Hortovanyi

The SaaS purist are always suggesting that a key characteristic of a true SaaS service provider, is to have the ability for it's clients to easily take their data and move to another service. Whilst in principle I agree with this, I think clarification is required.

If you've been using a properitary system like SAP, your data is in their format, stored in some relational database system. Its near impossible to migrate to another ERP, without a considerable amount of work.

The key point is that for the most part, there is no common way, to describe and hence then store your data in some intermediate format. This would hold true, regardless if the service was on-premise or off-premise.

Now I'm looking at Salesforce.com, and am trying to investigate the work required to move to say SugarCRM, either hosted myself or by an on-demand provider. Are there tools available for me to export my complete CRM data from Salesforce.com and then import into SugarCRM? Not that I can find.

I'm not saying that I don't like Salesforce.com. In fact, I'm liking the tool but believe there may be cheaper options that are more appropriate for our circumstances. For example I want to integrate to our existing LDAP server and also maybe to my local Apple Address Book on my Mac Book Pro.

Now Salesforce, gives me means to export data through reports. I haven't tried it yet, but looking at the process, it seems to have all the fields, including the additional ones that I created. Thus I can export data in some form, to potentially be loaded elsewhere. But this is not the same as the expectations that I think most users would have to then be able to utilise it quickly on the new service. Whilst there is some flexibility on importing information into Salesforce, for existing accounts and contacts. I can already see that the history of what has occurred would possible be lost.

But Salesforce is regarded as a leader in the SaaS space. Yet the capabilities are not there as readily, I would say, as the purists would expect to export or import my complete data. I think, for most users, once the commitment has been made to utilise the service, that they acknowledge that the real commitment, will be longer then the life of the initial subscription.

The need to export data, and in what format, can only be determined, at this time, once a new service has been selected. Correct me if I'm wrong here? SaaS providers can tick the box, they can placate some of the Purists, but is it really what the person paying the bills want?

Tags sugarcrm salesforce crm saas data vendor life+cycle   |  Comments 0

"Context of Value" - Aids Productivity

By Nick Hortovanyi

I use tools like Linked In and del.icio.us as a means of sharing information within the larger community that I participate in. Some of this information is only available to people that I share it with and other information is available to the internet public at large.

The notion of allowing other people to view details of their online activities is out of the question for some. For others it is potentially an extremely useful means of determining someone's current interests, views or intents. By intents, I mean, you are publishing your research which can be used to infer future activity. Inversely you are able to discover from passive observation, "Context of Value" to yourself as well.

Late last year, I used the then current tag cloud of my book marks, as the basis of writing my prediction blog entry for 2008 and to some extent it is exposing my interests at that time for this year. I have used my del.icio.us bookmark tags, through techniques introduce to me through the O'Reilly's Programming Collective Intelligence book, to find other people that have similar interests to myself.

Over the last couple of weeks, I noticed some entries in other people's new Linked In connections and also in their del.icio.us book marks that intrigued me. I asked some direct questions through other tools and low and behold I received affirmative confirmation of the intent that was depicted. They indeed were looking for new jobs.

Now this information can be misused by organisations that are trolling for these types of context patterns within social software data. The above point is a case in hand that could be open to mis use. However, I believe strongly, that within a community, be it closed, like in a larger corporation or within a more open community over the internet, that there is a larger amount of "Context of Value". This "Context of Value" helps people get things done by allowing them to find people or information that can help them achieve a beneficial outcome. Isn't this what productivity is about?

Tags data social+software context+of+value value   |  Comments 0