This is the 327th article in the Spotlight on IT series. If you'd be interested in writing an article on the subject of backup, security, storage, virtualization, mobile, networking, wireless, cloud and SaaS, or MSPs for the series PM Eric to get started.
About eight months ago we took over another company and as a result inherited a small office with five staff at the other end of the country. They were using a database server that held customer records hosted on an onsite server. This “server” was one of my first areas of concern when I made my first site visit — it was a two-year old domestic HP PC running Windows 7 Home Premium installed by the previous IT contractor in a hurry after their previous server passed away suddenly at the ripe old age of 9.
The essential database files were being backed up in an ad-hoc fashion to a USB key...