I’ve you’ve never been unlucky enough to have gone through a hard drive crash and major loss of data I envy you. I might be luckier than some as I’ve only experienced complete hard drive failure once and that was due to a computer virus.

All I can say is that if you’ve never experienced this you’re lucky and whether you have or haven’t had a hard drive failure you should take some basic steps to prevent hard drive failure or to make recovering your data a fairly easy task.

Some obvious ways of protecting your computer and your data are:

1. Keep your software up to date by upgrading using the latest stable release.

2. Use an anti-virus program to protect your computer.

3. Never open a file that arrives in your email if it’s from someone that you don’t know, if you weren’t expecting the attachment or if it seems suspicious in any way.

4. Backup your data to another hard drive, server, external drive, CD or DVD regularly.

There are many reasons why your hard drive might fail. Power failure is another reason, as is visiting a website that infects your computer with malicious code. However, in my opinion, failing to do some or all of the above mentioned suggestions are probably the number one reasons that lead to hard drive failure.

I don’t know how many times I’ve talked to friends, relatives, coworkers or web friends and they’ve told me that their hard drive crashed or some of the programs that they rely on most won’t work anymore. When I ask them if they have a recent backup or if they use an anti virus program more often than not they say no.

Hard drive failure is bad enough for the home computer user, but if the hard drive failure occurs on a business computer or servers hard drive it could mean downtime, loss of income and loss of valuable company data.

For those who’s hard drives have failed and they are unfortunate enough not to have a backup of their data, or perhaps had a backup failure as well as a crashed hard drive there are companies such as DTI Data that specialize in hard drive recovery. Not only is DTI DATA the only manufacturer authorized data recovery company to provide flat rate pricing for hard drive recovery, but they also have a fantastic data guarantee:

If DTI DATA fails to recover your data you don’t pay!

That claim does come with an exception. If your hard drive was opened elsewhere the guarantee doesn’t apply.

DTI Data can perform hard drive repair on many types of hard drives and servers. For example they offer services for SCSI Hard Drive repair and recovery, Exchange Server Recovery, RAID Data Recovery, laptop hard drive recovery, Western Digital hard drive recovery and even adaptive logic hard drive recovery for those who sent their hard drive to another company for repair before trying DTI Data.

Data recovery and hard drive repair takes place in a class 100 clean room.

DTI Data also offers a number of Data Recovery Resources such as do it yourself recovery software that has been developed in house.

You’ll find software that can be purchased on their website that will help you recover all of the data on your hard drive, assist in recovering lost digital pictures, CD/CDRW DVD/DVDRW drive data recovery, fast file undelete, e-Recovery for Outlook Express and Outlook as well as other forms of data recovery software.

If you’ve been unfortunate enough to have a hard drive failure visit the site and fill out their online quote form or call their toll free number to talk with one of their hard drive recovery specialists.

Whether your an occasional at home computer user or someone who relies heavily on your computer for business there’s no denying how important it is to back up your vital files regularly. All it takes is a computer virus or a power failure and your data could be lost forever.

While there are many back up programs that you could use I think you might agree that Backup Platinum has quite a few useful features.

Backup Platinum allows you to back up your data to pretty much any type of storage medium meaning you could store your valuable backup data on another computer, a network, an external drive, an FTP server or even a CD or DVD.

Not only that, you can set up regular backups using the program wizard in order to define what is backed up, where it’s backup from, how to back up your data and when those backups should take place.

If you chose to backup your data onto a CD or DVD you can use a rewritable disk. The program can be set up so that any data on the disk is erased prior transferring new backup data. This means that you could set the Backup Platinum program to create a new backup each night and only the latest backup would be on your rewritable CD or DVD.

Backups can be kept small and secure thanks to the programs 128-bit encryption with Blowfish and multichoice ZIP. Also, if you happen to have a lot of data to backup the backup can be split into several parts which would make it easer to transfer your finished backup data elsewhere if needed.

One thing that I like about this program is that it creates detailed logs of all operations and if something goes wrong with your backup you can easily restore with a simple click of a button.

Backup Platinum has been specifically designed to work on Windows operating systems.

If you’d like to try Backup Platinum you can download a limited 30 day trial version. Then if you like the programs features you can purchase the license for a full copy.

I don’t think that there’s much that Google doesn’t have it’s hand in these days.

The latest news is that we’ll soon be able to create websites on Google. The sites will run on Google servers and I imagine will be fairly easy to use for non-techies. By that I mean you won’t have to know much if any code to create a website of your own within a matter of minutes!

Here’s a news story I found that discusses Google’s latest step into the world of website creation:

If you have an online store or perhaps want to start one in order to sell your merchandise you should visit the AspDotNetStorefront e-commerce by design website.

Perhaps you’ve been using another service for your e-commerce store or have been struggling with freeware e-commerce software, but you’ve found that it doesn’t offer you flexibility or the ease of use that you had been hoping to find. If that’s the case you need to visit AspDotNetStorefront and download a free trial of their
ecommerce software solution.

AspDotNetStorefront will not only make it easier for you to set up your ecommerce storefront, but it will also help you promote your site on search engines. The software provides integrated seamless support for search engine indexing. Every page of your storefront can be indexed on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. There is also full control over all meta tags, page descriptions, titles, and keywords. All of which will ensure that your site is indexed properly.

There are actually so many features it’s hard to know where to begin to describe them to you.

AspDotNetStorefront is designed to be flexible. The creators of this innovative E-commerce shopping cart software have ensured that you can make your store unique. You can design store front skins using Dreamweaver or Frontpage.

Merchants can access their storefront via a web based control panel.

How will your clients pay for your merchandise? That’s up to you! AspDotNetStorefront supports a number of payment systems such as Paypal, Linkpoint, Verisign, credit card, E-Check, Check by mail and Authorize.net. Shipping rates are also integrated into the software for services such as FedEx, USPS, DHL, and Canada Post.

There’s no limits on the size of the database or the number of products that you can sell from your e-commerce site. Nor is there a limit to the amount of departments or categories that you can create.

AspDotNetStorefront users can password protect topics, set minimum quantities, and have the ability to track affiliates through order records and customer.

I’ve barely touched on the number of features within this e-commerce software package. You really need to visit the site for yourself to read about all the features. It’s mind boggling! If I were setting up an e-commerce storefront I would seriously consider this product. Check it out.

As many of the regular readers of The Webfiles know I’ve had quite a bit of hosting troubles in the last few months. I’ve had to change hosts three times because my sites - 10 domains with 17 sites between them - have overused the CPU resources at which ever web hosting company I was using a the time.

As I tried to explain on one of my other blogs, even a huge surge of traffic such as one that might come from a very well stumbled or dugg post could push my current hosting account over it’s limit! This problem will become worse as my new domains start to gain traffic.

I’ve got to face it. I’m going to have to move my sites over to a hosting provider that can offer me VPS hosting. It’s a reality and it would be better if I make the move before I encounter problems with my current host.

One company that has just begun to offer VPS Hosting is Network Solutions.

As some of you might know a Virtual Private Server hosting account is the step between shared hosting which is what most people start out with when they decide to host a website on their own domain and a dedicated hosting account.

With a shared hosting account you share the servers resources with all the other account holders that use that service. Some web hosts oversell their accounts and an account holder like myself with websites that have fairly high traffic and that use databases and other software to run them can get into trouble quite easily by overusing the system resources allocated to them on that server.

With a VPS account the server is virtually partitioned so that each account holder has the ability to run their own operating system and applications (ie wordpress, databases, CMS, Forums and so on) and if something goes wrong they can reboot their portion of the server independently from the rest of the VPS account holders on the same system.

In other words as a VPS account user you’d have more control over your hosting account and the server that you are using.

Companies, like Network Solutions, that provide VPS hosting services often allocate more resources to their VPS accounts than they do for those with shared hosting. So there should be a higher percentage of CPU resources and RAM allocated to each account.

Network Solutions offers three VPS hosting packages - VPS Standard, VPS Advanced and VPS PRO. The basic features of each account are the amount of disk space offered - 10 GB to 50 GB, Monthly Data Transfer 500 GB up to 2000 GB, the maximum amount of domains that can be hosted in each VPS account ranges from 10 to 100, and each comes with the ability to create 50 to 200 POP E-Mail accounts.

The VPS Standard and Advanced hosting packages come with SWsoft light Pack software, and the VPS PRO package comes with SWsoft Deluxe. I believe that all of the packages include Virtuozzo and the Plesk Control Panels.

Their pricing for VPS hosting looks reasonable to me. The Standard package starts at $50 per month, where as their Advanced costs $75 per month and their PRO VPS hosting costs $100 per month.

There are a few things that I like about Network Solutions VPS Hosting service. The will assist you with the creation of your account and the creation of a domain. Certainly as a newbie to VPS I, for one, would need that service! They will also assist you with the installation of applications from their application vault as well as customizing the Plesk desktop and other server related service issues. They have a toll free number and they offer both online and live 24/7 support. Believe me, whatever type of hosting account you have, a company that offers both a toll free number as well as 24/7 support is something you’ll want to have when you run into issues with your hosting account!

I’m going to look further into Network Solutions VPS hosting because as I said I’m going to need to upgrade my hosting very soon. If you think you might need to switch to VPS hosting or that you might want to move your current VPS hosting account over to a new host do visit the Network Solutions site to see if their VPS hosting packages suit your needs.