Tech Essentials | Reviewing New Business Technology in Alberta from Cameras to Tax Software

The best in new business technology

Apr 1, 2010  

by Gunnar Blodgett

Data El Fresko

Calgary’s El Fresko Technologies has announced MagnaStor, its new software-driven data archiving solution. MagnaStor requires you to install software on your local drive, then uses Internet Explorer to log onto elfresko.com. In order to use the data archiving, you must agree to have El Fresko reformat one of your drive partitions (anybody remember format c:?) … which in our case it then was unable to complete. Tech Essentials does not recommend you try this until it’s been demonstrated in somebody else’s safe environment.

As internal hard drives for personal computers expand past 500 Gigabytes and even keychain-sized USB drives pass 32 Gb, what’s the future of data storage, backup and archiving? At present, Seagate is offering an 8 Terabyte network storage server ($1,699 US) and LaCie sells a 24 Tb storage rack ($8,499 US), but how does one handle backups for such vast amounts of data? Quarter-inch cartridge linear tape (QIC) sizes range from 80Mb to 2Gb, which is sufficient for daily backups of accounting and internet data, but not for video or magazine archives. Linear Tape Open (LTO) Utrium technology offers 1.6 Tb of compressed data storage, but doesn’t this still require tape-swapping on the afore mentioned 24 Tb rack? Our next Tech Essentials column ventures into the murky world of cloud-based data storage.

The Continuing Sage Saga

On a lighter note, Simply Accounting technical support has advised that income information such as “Employee-paid premiums for private health services plans” must be entered manually on T4s when using Simply Accounting payroll software.

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