Happy EOYFS - curse the Advertising Agency that came up with that one!

DRevolution is having an End of Financial Year Sale.

Sign up for bulk billing and get over 37% off the standard support rate!
Simply pay for 20 or more hours of pre-paid support before June 30 and pay only $120 per hour.
Bulk Billing credits never expire and can be used when you wish.
Also, claim your IT expenses for the upcoming year NOW.

Contact us if you want to take advantage of this sale.

NOTE: EOYFS stands for "End Of Financial Year Sale"
Anyone know who came up with the term first? - let us know…

Backup - A cautionary tale…

What would happen if you lost all your data?

Recently, a client called me in because their computer was running slow.
Ended up that their hard disk was failing with bad blocks - parts of the disk that become unreadable.
The disk was becoming more unusable by the minute, so we sent the disk of for data recovery.
Recovery was handled by Payam Data Recovery - they have been - BY FAR - the best data recovery firm I have dealt with in 15 years.
I have had clients spend from a few hundred dollars to a over $2000 to recover data from dead and deleted disks.
Add to that, being offline for a few days followed by more fees for someone like me to re-setup the machine and put back all the recovered data in the correct spots - it can be quite an experience.

Ask yourself;
Do you have current backup and is it readable?
Are there offsite copies in case of fire/theft?
If any of the above answers are NO - contact us…

When is the best time to buy a new computer? hint: I do NOT sell computers.

Every week I get asked - "When do I get a new machine"

Much to the dismay of the resellers I use, I recommend holding off this year till July 1.
As of July 1, small businesses will be able to instant write-off any computer purchases under $5000.
That means instead of depreciating the purchase down over 3 years as is the norm, you claim the full amount that tax year.
NOTE: A small business has less than 2 million dollars turnover.

On the other hand, buying services like pre-paid support before July 30 means you can claim the full amount in this tax year.
If you would like to purchase pre-paid support that you can use whenever you need, Contact us.

D Revolution is NOT a bookkeeping or accounting firm - if in doubt, ask someone who knows…

iCloud - cloudy goodness and reducing the time and cost of music backups

Apple Introduced the latest version of OS X 10.7, iOS 5 and a mobileme replacement - iCloud.

Whilst a lot has been said on the blogosphere that does not need repeating, there a few interesting nuggets to take away from the Apple announcement.

New version of the operating system that powers iDevices - can't complain, looks nice, move along.

Latest version of OS X 10.7 - interesting meld of iPhone/iPad features - system wide auto saving and versioning all documents.
It will be interesting to see how it interacts with application auto-save features existing software.
Will it back the temp files created by Indesign or MYOB?
Also, purchase is via the App Store built into OS X 10.6.6 or later. There is no mention of how to upgrade from previous versions of OS X.
Also being an online download of approximately 4 GB , if you upgrade a new few machines, that will be a massive amount of internet usage.

iCloud - Hopefully the roll-out will be smooth compared to when Mobile Me was released.
Looking from a brand perspective, I still can't recommend it for email etc… as it is not under your domain name and most likely never will be.
For sharing documents, calendars, emails etc... Google Apps is still a better choice.
Better support, attached to your domain name, aggressive roll-out of new features and more.

The 2 best features are cost - free, and the iTunes Match paid addition.
Alot of my clients, being creative, have huge libraries of acquired music.
The service will scan them and if they are part of the iTunes catalogue of 18 million songs, they do not need to be uploaded. If they are not on the catalogue, they are uploaded and synced across up to 10 devices.
The limit is 25000 songs (purchases from iTunes are excluded) which equates to around 75GB of songs.
If you had to backup an iTunes library of this size to disk it would take around an hour, if you had to upload to the cloud with Amazon's or Google's service, it would take weeks!!
Since with iTunes Match does not need to upload anything already on the iTunes catalogue, the online backup could take literally minutes.

Introducing the Apple Store for Business

Proton Digital is no longer selling Apple, so I am now dealing with Stuart Hill from the Apple Store for Business.

If you need to purchase a new or refurbished Apple equipment, from computers, to iPads and iPhones, I can now source these at discount direct from Apple.
Contact us or speak directly to Stuart direct if you need a quote.

Remember, if you need software or any non Apple equipment, Ross Pappas from I Need Storage is still the man to see. I have dealt with Ross for a decade and he is the best in town…

Sydney CeBit Wrap-up

Cebit has come and gone again. Here are the highlights.

If you have ever attended CeBIT, it is an odd mix of companies.
From Chinese suppliers trying to strike up import deals for fans, LED's, IC's (integrated circuits), to computer manufacturers, merchandise manufacturers, data centre cabinet/aircon/power suppliers.

Firstly what WASN'T there…

This year saw a big decrease in NAS (Network Attached Storage) as well as alot of the SAAS (software as a service) providers like SugarCRM, SASSU were missing. Also missing was alot of the larger networking providers like Netgear and TPLink which was a surprise.

What did catch my eye…

EnBox Anti-Spam
An Australian company doing cloud based Anti-Spam - that is intercepting spam before it ever reaches your mailserver.
The interesting angle is they charge per domain, not per user like everyone else (like the Google owned Postini which we use).
Large companies with 500+ employees can pay the same per month as companies with 3 employees.

uRemote home automation
Control your home theatre including Foxtel, free to air, radio, mac, set top box from an iPhone or iPad - Cool!

TMS Offsite Data Storage
Not sexy, but important - offsite storage of removable media (tapes, disks even servers for disaster recovery.
They come to you and organise all the swapping of media for offsite storage in a "Vault" - I will get a tour of the vault in the coming weeks.

FitzBox full featured router
High quality brand from Germany. Feature and price wise look very nice. One concern for Apple users is the remote VPN access has to be setup from a Windows PC. I am organising a test model from the distributor PCRange to put it through it's paces (like ALL equipment recommended by D Revolution)

OneSaaS integrate all you Saas applications
A portal that can synchronise data between all your different SaaS/cloud applications.
Send you HighRise client data to PayPal then forward it to xero - very powerful.
I will be signing up next week to test integration between the online products we use and maybe pay for a few extra integrations to our helpdesk etc…

Sky is falling! just removed a virus from a mac!!

This week I removed my second malware from a mac - the end is nigh.

The malware was the much publicised MacDefender - it took more time to setup the remote session then it did to quit the Malware, trash it and delete the login item.
As a bit of background, I have setup and maintained in excess of 1500 Apple workstations , the majority of them since I setup D Revolution in 1998.
In all that time, I have personally removed 2 OS 9 viruses that infect windows shares on on Harlequin RIP's and 2 OS X pieces of Malware.
The first Malware was a DNS changer which consisted of an Internet plugin (disguised as a codec for watching "certain movies") and this weeks MacDefender.

Contrast this with one of my clients that runs a mixed network. In the last 6 months, I have had to send out Windows contractors to delete viruses on Window XP and Vista machines with fully up to date commercial anti-virus programs. Luckily they have not been hit with a bootsector virus or ransomware yet…