Backup and Archive …..Know the Difference

 

Information availability and IT operations require Data Backup. Legal and Compliance requirements dictate Data Archival. But many organizations make the mistake of equalizing Archive with Backup, which can lead to wrong choice of backup or archival media, very poor restore time and even loss of information.

Example Scenario

As part of an audit, an auditor reviewed the backup and archival system of a company. The company presented their backup systems, access controls and audit. When asked about archived data, they again pointed to the tapes containing their backup. But their backup tapes are rotated every 6 months, so the company does not have any archive from earlier then 6 months ago.  The company failed the legal Archival requirement.

Analysis

In order to properly design and architect a backup or archive systems, one must clearly understand the differences between backup and archive:

Backup

 

The key reason for the existence of backup is to provide an alternative data source in case the primary data source is corrupted or destroyed. A Backup process is creating a copy of the current state of data. It is understood and accepted that the state of the backed up data will change in the future under controlled circumstances. At that point the old backup will become irrelevant for operational purposes and the data will need to be backed-up again.

Criteria for selecting a backup solution

• The backup needs to be accessible fast
• The media should be reusable for maximum cost efficiency
• The media should survive transport in less then ideal conditions (trunk of a car)
• The backed up information should survive with full integrity and availability for several months on the backup media.
• The backup should be able to span multiple media (if backup set is larger then media capacity).
• The solution should be intelligent enough to enable different backup sets (full backup, incremental backup, differential backup etc)

Archive

The key reason for the existence of archive is to provide historical reference of information. The archive’s process final product is a long term non-changeable copy of data or information. It is understood and accepted that the archive media must be resilient, capable of surviving over long periods of time (years) and must guarantee that the archived data remain unchanged during the entire archive lifespan.

Criteria for selecting archive solution

• The archive media needs to be able to operate with different data collections while treating them at the same level of integrity – individual data records from a database as well as entire documents,
• The access speed to an archive can be slow, but archive media should have an extremely high level of reliability (remember, archives can span several decades)
• When creating an archive, always plan the lifetime of the archive, and make sure that the manufacturer will provide systems that can retrieve the stored data – having an archive that is unreadable because there is nothing to read it on is a terrible idea.
• Data integrity must be maintained over the entire period of the archive existence – there is no point in having an archive if you can’t trust that it’s the same as it was when archived.
• There should be an index of archive media to retrieve relevant information from archive

Conclusion
Backup and archive solutions may be part of an integral system, but they perform a different function, so the actual media and individual systems will most likely vary.
While backup is still performed mostly on magnetic tapes, archive is usually performed on optical disks or microfilm. You may choose magnetic media for archive, but if you do, you need to plan that your archive tapes must be shielded from long term adverse influences, and you must maintain a functional reader for the tapes over the entire lifespan of the archive.

Quick Tips on Secure Shell

SSH is a perfect security alternative to Telnet and has been used by system administrators and IT managers to configure, implement servers and network devices. Here I wanted to list a manual on Secure Shell usage.

First let’s start by choosing SSH client. We will find no problem because generally there are two accepted solutions PuTTY and SecureCRT , both are really good. But while SecureCRT is not a free solution we find that many IT Technician prefer to use PuTTY.

With using PuTTY you can connect to your server via: Raw, Telnet, Rlogin, FTP (SFTP), SSH1, SSH2. In addition to supporting all these protocols you can find more TOOLS:

– Puttygen – generator Rsa / Dsa keys used for authentication.
– Pagent – authentication agent helps to store the keys in memory.
– Plink – command line interface.
– Pscp – utility that provides safe files copying.
– Psftp – secure ftp-client for copying, viewing, renaming files…

Despite all these functionality, working with SecureCRT is more comfortable for one useful option which is using the tabs for different sessions. If you are working on five servers or even more for example with putty you will find some difficulties in switching between them, but to handle this French group released PuTTY Connection Manager .

PuTTY Connection Manager is free PuTTY Client Add-on for Windows platforms which goal is to provide a solution for managing multiple PuTTY instances. So PuTTY Connection Manager will only combine the open windows in a user-friendly interface, and also provides an advanced interface for the connection settings.

Well to implement the server side SSH you can use the standard OpenSSH it is by default installed on any UNIX distribution for other system you can setup DropBear . It is an open source software useful for “embedded”-type Linux (or other UNIX) systems, such as wireless routers. For Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, and Windows7 you can use WinSSHD or MobaSSH and all that you need is to press install button and the system will immediately adds the new service.

MobaSSH is basically an OpenSSH that is compiled with Cygwin. And you will have a number of useful commands:

– MobaHwInfo: provides information about the OS and Hardware.
– MobaSwInfo: list the software and application installed on the system
– MobaTaskList, MobaKillTask: list the processes running on the system and kill the desired processes.
– TCPCapture: Monitor the Network
– Scp, sftp: Transfer files through an encrypted channel
– Rsync, wget: synchronizing local folders to network resources.

If we are talking about SSH we cannot miss the secure file transfer, when you connect to server via SSH, client can perform all basic operations: upload file to the server, rename files and folders, change files properties, and create links and shortcuts. One of the most famous utility here on windows is WinSCP .

Now it is very important to keep your system up to date and mitigate the risk but there is a very important thing to do is to protect your system against brute force attack. Authorization using login and password considered not secure so in most cases it is recommended to disable it on server. But if we really need it you should implement intrusion prevention system. For example Sshguard .

Sshguard will help to monitor logs, detect attacks and block the attacker with a firewall rule. the logs are collected from (syslog, syslog-ng, metalog, multilog, raw) and it calculate the suspicious activity such as passwords guessing attempts and block IP addresses by using the local packet filtering (pf, ipfw, netfilter / iptables, or hosts.allow file).

There are also some similar projects such as Fail2ban and Sshdfilter 1.5.5 .

As you can see it is possible to do your tasks in a fast and secure way regardless the environment implemented using Secure Shell.

How to shrink/decrease the PDF file Size

 

In this post, I will try to show you a couple of methods to reduce the size of a PDF file. Depending on whether or not you have Adobe Acrobat (the full version), you can try one method.

Method 1 – Print file using Adobe Print driver

The easiest way to try and shrink a PDF file is to perform a little trick, which basically is printing the PDF document to a PDF file. Sounds strange? It is. Basically, you open the PDF file in Adobe Reader and print it to the Adobe PDF printer.

A lot of time this works really well and will significantly reduce the size of your PDF file. When you go to File – Print, choose Adobe PDF from the drop down list of printers:

 

Image Source: Adobe Blogs

Amazingly enough, I’ve been able to shrink a 20 MB PDF file down to 3 MB just by using this method. Not really sure what it does to shrink it, but it works, especially if you have a good number of images that are eating up a lot of space.

Method 2 – Use Adobe Acrobat PDF Optimizer

Since version 7 of of Adobe Acrobat, there is a new option in the Advanced menu called PDF Optimizer.

Now you’ll be brought to a screen that has a whole bunch of options to configure!

Click on the Audit space usage button in the top right to get a detailed listed of each component of the PDF file and exactly how much space it is using:

As you can see, there are six different things you can do to make a PDF file smaller including optimizing or down-scaling images, reconfiguring scanned pages, adjusting fonts, adjusting transparency, discarding objects, and cleaning up the PDF file.

Under Images, for example, you can downsample and compress the images to save space. This is really useful, especially if your images are at a really high resolution that is not needed. For view on the screen, you only need 72 pixels.

If you scanned a bunch of pages into your PDF, then click on the Scanned Pages option and mess around with the sliding bar, which goes from Small Size to High Quality. Adjust as needed.

The Discard Objects and Discard User Data are two really useful cleanup options for PDF files. You can basically get rid of all the extra junk that is normally stored in every PDF file. You can remove tags, flatten form fields, etc.

For Discard User Data, you can get rid of comments, document information, metadata, object data, file attachments, data from other applications, and more.

Finally, the Clean Up tab does a few more housekeeping tasks like compressing the entire file and optimizing the PDF for fast web view.

The best thing to do is to play around with all the settings to see what works best for your particular PDF file. Enjoy!

After Vista Update CPU Keeps Restarting

I have Vista home premium and It got  updated automatically after the update its keep on saying that updating 3 of 3 updated 0 % and restarting….

I am going to give you a step by step resolution for this problem

For this You just boot with your vista CD/DVD and go past to the language setup and select “ Repair my Computer ” let it run its startup repair go to advanced and select "command prompt”  at the prompt rename the following files

ren C:\windows\winsxs\pending.xml C:\windows\winsxs\pending.old.xml Press enter

ren C:\windows\winsxs\cleanup.xml  C:\windows\winsxs\cleanup.old.xml Press enter.

Do not worry if the last one fails reboot.

You will still have the nag however shortly windows will open.

Now go to start search and type "services.msc” (without quotes) Navigate to windows update and right click select "stop" click apply.

Next go to windows explorer and navigate to c:\windows\ software distribution, expand to show all in the right pane select all (in the right pane) and then delete.

Reboot, windows will recreate software distribution and the nag will have gone away. Go back to services.msc and make sure windows update has started.

References:

If you don’t have your Vista OS disk you can download the vista recovery disk from the following link

 Vista Recovery disk..

 

Subbu