have a white board above my desk that has scrawls on it of things I need to do.  I use it to brainstorm.  The good ones make it into my Outlook calendar and task list.  This list continues to get bigger and bigger.  As a business owner, I’m sure I’m not alone in having more things to do than hours to do them.  Some of the things are really important.  I know it.  But which ones can I afford to put off while I work on the current ones?

One need I hope you don’t wait on is “protect my data.”  I had another customer call me up yesterday and tell me that he just signed up for the MirrorDisk service in the past month and had a crash over the weekend.  He was thrilled that we could ship him a set of disks to completely rebuild his computer to just how it was prior to his accident.  I also had a call from a woman who said she had been meaning to back up her computer for several months now.  She sheepishly admitted the reason is finally getting around to it is that she just paid $400 to a computer repair shop to reinstall Windows, her programs, and try to get back her data.  She said she didn’t lose everything, but was still waiting to hear on the health of her contact list.  Please don’t wait. 

We’ve seen a number of articles lately proclaiming that anti-virus is dead.  Essentially the authors are saying that the virus-writers are actually testing their software on the various anti-virus products and then preparing variants in anticipation of the fixes that the anti-virus vendors will send out.  The sheer quantity of all these viruses and their variants overwhelm the research labs and it becomes a case of triage rather than complete eradication.  The same pundits who make these pronouncements agree that until you have a better strategy, you need to continue with your anti-virus regimen, but you have to supplement it with other forms of protection. 

One of the best forms of protection for your data is to back it up.  MirrorDisk service gives you the ability to do exactly that.  Every day.  Automatically.

For more information...

• Our first newsletter:  We just completed our first newsletter and will be e-mailing it to our customers in the next few days.  It contains several tips on how to better utilize our system (schedule your snapshots, recover individual files and other related things).
• We are also planning a promotion for our customers: If you refer a new customer to us, we’ll give you a free month of service.  Many of our customers have used the recovery portion of our service.  While we hope that you will never need it, we always feel great when we get the follow-up e-mail from a newly restored computer telling us that they’re back up and running.  Please share your satisfaction with friends and relatives.  We’ll all benefit from working together!
• There are a number of enhancements that we’re looking to add to our service:  Most of us know that it’s a good idea to run disk defragmenter on a regular basis and other things that will cause your computer to run more quickly.  Please let me know if there are any repetitive tasks that you’d like to have us automate for you (enhancements@theitsquad.com).  All current customers receive our “optimization” services free of charge and these are some of the things we’re looking at adding.
• We’ve brought on another infrastructure specialist in the past week.  His name is Chris.  Some of you may have spoken with him on the phone already.  He’s a great guy who has several years of experience with our products.  He also has experience as the technology director for a NHL Hockey team.  We expect great things from Chris. 
• Partner alert:  If you would like to be a partner of The IT Squad, we do allow people to act as referring agents or as resellers.  Please contact us for details.