Tag Archives: type

Be Prepared BEFORE the Disaster Happens

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Having your data ready at your fingertips allows your business to be competitive. Without that data, your company is jeopardized. So, think what would happen, specifically to your business, if a disaster to your computer(s) happens. Are you prepared? Do you have a recovery plan in place? Here are some guidelines to help ensure your data will always be available.

Ensuring Your Data Survives a Disaster

Develop A Plan

It makes sense to say the Disaster Recovery Plan is the key to surviving a data disaster. This plan must allow for:

    • Data Backup

      Whether it is on-line or on-site, creating a duplicate copy of your data is absolutely necessary. Caution: Do not rely on manual procedures for backups — you may forget to do them. Always looks for an automated procedure for data backup.

    • Redundancy

      Determine if you need data backed up in more than one place.

    • Geographic Displacement

      Housing your critical data in a different geographic region will guard against natural disasters taking down your data.

    • File and Folder Identification

      Not all files and folders are critical. Program files can always be reinstalled. Specific user data could be lost forever if not backed up.

    • Backup Schedule

      Identify if you want daily (nightly) backups that occur when most users are away from their machines, or if you want continuous backup. Continuous backup ensures most recent changes are captured, but there is a reduction of processing speed that will be noticed.

    • Backup Type

      Additionally, identify the specific type of data backup. That is, do the files need full or incremental backups? Do you need full backups done once a week, with incremental backups done daily?

  • Retention Policy

    Specify how long files need to be retained. Although disk space is much cheaper than it has ever been, capture and storing files indefinitely may not be the best option. Keep business data retention policies in mind, too.

Critically important to the Disaster Recovery Plan is management understanding and support. This means business management must acknowledge and fund the necessary steps and tools for implementing the Recovery Plan.

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UpdateStar Online Backup Review: What Does It Offer?

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UpdateStar has some good features built into it. It may or may not be what you’re looking for, depending upon your needs and the amount of backing up you need to do.

UpdateStar is a backup service that provides the usually compliment of products and add-ons to help you get started. For instance, there’s an application that you install on your computer that allows you to backup your files quite easily. There’s also a series of support options that you can call upon if you happen to get lost. The company uses compression and encryption to make backing up files faster and more secure.

There are some nice features to the UpdateStar service. The licensing is very flexible, so you can move to a new computer if you get one without having to worry about any hassles. Beyond that, however, you’ll find that the service is very similar to what most of the other companies out there in this field offer their clients.

Pros

UpdateStar has some good features built into it that business and personal users will like. For instance, there is a feature that allows you to backup external drives. This is handy if you have most of your files stored on removable media such as a fire wire hard drive. There are also technological advantages to this system, such as block-level backups, but these don’t really differentiate it from the other offerings out there. This is a “set it and forget it” type system that automatically takes care of your backups for you once you set them to run.

Cons

The UpdateStar service doesn’t do much to make itself stand out from the competition. The versioning support, ease of use and other features are all offered by its competitors, as well, so there isn’t much here if you’re looking for a feature that really puts it over the top in terms of what it has to offer. There aren’t any drawbacks to this service, but it’s going to be competing on price and usability with its rivals and, in both regards, it fails to ascend to the top.

Analysis

While UpdateStar is a good company that offers a good service, it hasn’t really done the work to make itself the best out there. It supports 128-bit encryption in a world where much of the competition is supporting 256-bit encryption. Its interface is easy enough to use, but it’s not intuitive as are some of the competition’s offerings.

Conclusion

UpdateStar manages to be another offering for online backup in a world full of offerings for online backup. If you’re looking for something that’s going to knock your socks off, this probably isn’t it. It does everything you’d expect, but nothing that’s going to wow you. There are better products out there that have standout features that make them particularly well suited to specific demographics. UpdateStar is a sort of jack-of-all-trades being suitable for anyone but, at the same time, not really being spectacular for any particular type of user.

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Great to Use Less Framework to Produce Web Content for Multiple Devices

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As all the layouts are based on the same grid, elements created in one layout are reusable in the others without making lot of changes. For example, by adjusting the text elements or image sizes in one layout works in another. Lets say some more changes are also required, use the common baseline grid and type presets to fit in different UI elements.

Less Framework is easy and simple for CSS professionals. Its free from pre¬defined column classes, pre-compilers. Just keep playing creatively with HTML and CSS to design and develop content for multiple devices all at once.

Easy steps for CSS Engineers to get started with Less Framework

1. CSS Designers and Wireframe Designers can start with wireframes using Less Framework structure i.e. single grid, composed of 68 px columns with 24 px gutters.

2. Layout home page Layout for web browser and then move to other devices like phone or tablet as amount of columns change from layout to layout.

3. If your website design is content heavy. Typography pre¬sets available for CSS Designers in Less Frameworks like

24 px baseline grid;

16 px body text,

17 px,

18 px

are very useful. These typography sets contain many usable and aesthetically balanced type sizes based on the “Golden Ratio” rule which can easily used by CSS Engineering teams.

4. While working on wireframes spend less time on refining the font style or size because that can also be handled by UI Designers and CSS Engineers while converting design into HTML, just the placement and approximate ratio helps to decide layout of the webpage.

5. Once wireframes are completed based on Less Framework applying aesthetics to wireframe with in the Less Framework limits is faster and save lot of time for CSS Engineering teams. Avoid using gutter spaces to end design element for example don’t leave an edge of rectangular box in gutter space or text in gutter box. End them on the grid itself.

6. CSS/HTML conversion teams can make pixel perfect translation of UI design – pick Default Layout (992 px), and then use CSS3 media queries to code different child layouts: 768, 480, and 320 px. The Default Layout is picked by any browser, which does not support media queries. The various child layouts are displayed, as appropriate, on browsers that do support media queries. Its really fast to code them as they inherit all styles given to the Default Layout.

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