I was recently asked how to cost effectively do backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) for a 50 or so person organization.

Here is what I have found to be a pretty good way to go that won't break the bank.

For an organization this size I use Backup Assist (http://www.backupassist.com). It leverages Windows Backup and has agents for Exchange and SQL.

I then break things into three categories and treat each slightly differently.

Level 1
The things you call critical such as active email, source code, CRM, financial data, etc.
This stuff gets backed up daily and depending on my level of paranoia (how screwed we are if we lose X days) I copy it offsite either to an alternate office or if none exists (your scenario) to either a hosted server at a datacenter somewhere (max on the disk and bandwidth and min on all else which is much less than you $750 per month) or to a server connected via VPN to the company principle's house (poor man's hosted server).

Level 2
The things that change often, but just aren't level 1 such as home directories, business shares and other data.
Data in this category gets weekly backups and usually gets posted monthly to a large USB drive which gets rotated with its twin monthly. The drive with the current data is brought offsite for storage (again maybe to the company principal's house or maybe a safe deposit box). When the new drive is delivered the old one comes back to be used for the following month's backup.

Level 3
These are the unchanging files like images, email archives and stuff.
You can either burn these to optical media (if you do muliple copies with one going to the company principal's house(s) and a copy to the safety deposit box if you got one) or you can lump this onto the USB drive shuffle.

Hope this helps those who might be looking for this kind of insight.

The latest security threat as outlined here has hit over 100,000 people already and if you read through the details of how organized the attack is you will understand why it has been so successful. The problem is that while we have to protect ourselves from every threat, the bad guys only have to find one vulnerability to lay your plans to waste.

Security is a war, and the hackers are not slowing down their attacks.

It seems that everytime the government gets involved in high tech, things go wrong. Today I found out that there is a looming intervention that I think could potentially screw up one of the biggest successes in US based high tech, namely processor technology.

If you get time soon check out the petition here.

I would really like to see this kind of meddling prevented.

Lately I have been helping customers find talented developers. As the topic of many books, courses, web sites and numerous other sources (many of which I have read or used) it is a problem that I find keenly interesting.

There are of couse many, many ways to look at it, but I think I have found the single most important strength not just for technical talent. So take this as advice for your own advancement or as the thing to look for and test for when you are hiring. The key strength is to be able to accept feedback and objectively recognize it for truth when it is true and then have the strength of character to actually try to work to improve as a response.

It sounds easy, but it is not. It is also very much at odds with being an ego maniac (in other words those people can't do it). If someone passes this test then the sky is truly the limit, they will be able to improve, move up the ladders of responsiblity and will likley only be limited by the strength of their intellect.

Try it yourself sometime by asking someone for honest feedback and see if you can act on it. Repeat.

Over the last year I have gotten an education on PHP and MySQL web sites to go along with my existing expertise with ASP.Net and SQL Server.

It turns out that I purchased a web site a little over a year ago that supports gamers who play World of Warcraft (a game I have played for years). The site gets about 100,000 unique users a month with just shy of a million page views a month. The site was written in PHP against a MySQL backend and is just not driving the revenue yet to justify porting it to ASP.Net and SQL Server (though as you will read here the balance of pain is shifting that equation). It turns out that we end up rebooting the system pretty damn often which was a problem with IIS back in the old days, but not one I have had in recent versions.

We have thrown more hardware at the system, brought in professional help and it just seems that at these levels of use the system runs down and needs a kick and sometimes intensive care.

My point here is that it has been an education for me to validate what I suspected, there is no magic with the non-MS stack. It can hang in some regards, but it seems that for really heavy loads, MS has got them beat on stability. I am working on an ASP.Net with SQL Server site now that handles similar traffic and it just doesn't suffer the same issues.

I plan to dig deeper into the tech here if for no other reason to figure out what it takes to port the site to ASP.Net with SQL Server.