In This Issue:

• Message from the CEO
• Corporate News
• Operations
• Log Harvesting
• Forestry News
• Mill Report
• Safety Stats
• Safety
• Corporate Safety Program
• Information Systems
• Calendar

Download PDF version

Adobe Acrobat Reader is
required to view PDF files.

• News Top

By George RoseInformation Systems

What happening in I.T.

With all the recent changes in the Coulson Group of Companies network infrastructure: the Forestry move to 4th avenue, addition of the Tanker Base on our LAN (over a slow link) and the additional servers for the gaming center and restaurant, our current backup configuration was to the point where it is was very difficult to manage and not 100% reliable on a day to day basis.

I spent some time investigating our options and settled on a product from Microsoft called Data Protection Manager.

Data Protection Manager

This software is, in a word, awesome. I have configured it to backup, on a daily basis, all of our servers, our SQL (Explorer) and Exchange (email) databases, the restaurant Squirrel system, etc., as well as some data on workstations at remote sites. These remote backups allow certain users at sites with slow connections to the corporate offices, such as the Tanker Base, to work with data stored on their local machines rather than over a painfully slow network.

Restoring, the real beauty!

The area that I feel really shines in Data Protection Manager is when it comes to restoring files. Below is a shot of the restore screen:

Lost a file? Email the Help Desk with the file name, location, and date you would like it restored from and you can have it back in seconds. Individual exchange mailboxes are also easily restored. Everything is kept on a pair of mirrored 1 terabyte sata hard drives for 30 days and then archived to tape monthly and annually.

This software also has the capability to backup predetermined files and folders, shared and home directories for example, as often as every 15 minutes, and by installing a client on a user's workstation they would have the ability to restore their own files if required.