Michael Brandonisio

Hello,

It’s no secret JIKOmetrix offers online backup as a managed service. However, some times reality can punctuate the value of a service.

I received a call from a client around 9:00AM. “Hi Mike … Do you have minute?”

I respond, “Yes, how are things by you?”

The client continues, “Could be better. How do I go about getting files from my online backup account? I’m trying to prepare for a presentation in 3 hours.”

I respond, “What happened?”

They blurt, “I spilled a hot cup of coffee on my laptop. I tried draining the coffee from it by flipping it over like a tent but it won’t turn on any more.”

I reply, “Turn on anymore? You tried to turn it back on? … How long did you wait?”

They reply, “I let drain for about half hour and tried to power it up. Since it won’t power up I’m thinking that I should get my files from the online backup.”

As you can see your day can change from an average day to a “What do I do?” day very quickly.

I checked their account. It turns out that the backup client on their Mac power book had backed about 2 hours prior to the coffee spill. It also showed that they had over 50GB of data backed up.

They did not need all of their files restored now, but had a few items that they did want recovered before their presentation. So I showed them how to use the web restore to select the files and folders they wanted to get now. Then we ordered a full DVD restore of the most current files, Total data set to be delivered on DVD’s was 52GB.

Our service response is what made the difference from other self-service providers, we provided options that worked for the client and helped to claim a nerve racking situation.

We encourage everyone to backup their data. Insure your data, digital photo’s, financial records, and project work are safe and recoverable in the event of theft, accident or equipment failures.

Sign up today for our online backup service for as little as $15 per month. We perform the installation, configure, and test the backup process to ensure your important files and folders are backing up and can be recovered.

Secure Online Backup Solution

Call for a no hassle demonstration or to place your order today – (630) 759-9283

Sincerely,
Mike

Hello,

There are times when you want to create an archive of many files or even one large file but need the archive file to be smaller than some file size limitation. In my case, I needed to move 90GB of data literal over 1 million files over FTP. ( There is a story behind why it was done this way.) You do not want to move a million little files over FTP. You can get better performance by creating one large file or in my case about 26 TAR archives that were 3.5GB in size. The files were to be moved to a FAT-32 external hard drive prior to sending them via FTP. The Max file size for FAT-32 is 4GB. At least when I tried to create TAR files larger than that I would get an error. The 3.5GB files size worked well.

This works on Linux and Mac OS. Open a terminal window. Then run the following command:

# tar -cf – [source] | split -b 3584m – archive.tar

This will produce a series of TAR files from your [source] file/folder with the suffix of:

taraa, tarab, tarac … taraz, tarba, tarbb …

and so on. It will append the alpha series to the suffix of the archive. Then on the destination terminal run:

#cat archive.tara* | (tar x)

That will assemble the split files and extract the archive in to their source files.

Sincerely,
Mike

Hello,

I recently purchased a new 1TB external hard drive for a project. Now that the project is completed I wanted to re-purpose the hard drive for use as a backup drive with my Mac as a target for time machine.

I initially went to the ‘Disk Utility’ application in my utility folder to format the drive. However, each time I’d format it I received an error saying the format system failed when trying to format any of the Mac OS formats. It would format FAT-32 fine but not Mac specific formats.

It turns out that you have to select the parent drive in ‘Disk Utility’ then click on the Partition tab. There select 1 partition. Then click on the options button and select the first item GUID for Intel macs or second item Apple Partition for PPC Macs. Then click ‘OK’. Now click ‘Apply’ button (for Leopard) or ‘Partition’ button (for Tiger) .

You now have a Mac OS compatible external hard drive that can be set to boot your Mac if needed.

The issue is that most external hard drives come formatted as FAT-32 or NTFS with a windows partition. By changing the partition to GUID  or Apple Partition we can format the drive Mac Extended Journaled or any other Mac OS format.

Sinerely,
Mike