Beginner’s Guide to Backup in Milpitas

The Internet Wealth Group in Milpitas is hosting an Evault seminar entitled “A Beginner’s Guide to Backing Up Critical Data” on March 19th.

Given that it appears primarily to be an infomercial about Evault offerings, I'm surprised they're charging money for it, but perhaps the money goes to cover the cost of renting the space, which one doesn't have with the more typical webinars used to present such offerings.

Given the list of topics, the seminar focuses on issues for slightly larger businesses than the ones I usually address in this blog:

• What critical data needs to be backed up
• Challenges facing small businesses today (increase data growth, limited IT resources…)
• Traditional tape backup method (steps and risks involved, data breaches in the news)
• How EVault’s online backup works (simplified overview, show how easy it is to set-up, easy to restore data)
• Other EVault product offerings (ProMail, ArcWare, EVaultReports)

Evault is a subsidiary of Seagate, but I have no experience with them. I do, however, feel somewhat suspicious about the Internet Wealth Group. It's not so much the 1990s logo (which suggests they can't afford a designer, a bit peculiar in a “wealth group”) as the fact that they can't spell the word “calendar.”

But hey, I'm all in favor of any kind of education about backup, so if you want to go, you can sign up here.

HP Offers Course in How to Back Up

Hewlett Packard is offering a course entitled Protect Your Data: Back Up to Tape, Disk, and the Network. The class is aimed at small and medium businesses. You can enroll at any time by clicking the link above.

Better than Backup?

And while we're on the subject of seminars, time)spring, maker of TimeData continuous data production software, is offering a webinar entitled “Way Better than Backup for Windows.” This one takes place on multiple dates. Just click on a link if you want to attend.

• Thursday May 3, 8am Pacific
• Tuesday May 8, 8am Pacific
• Wednesday May 9, 3pm Pacific
• Wednesday May 16, 9am Pacific
• Thursday May 17, 2pm Pacific
• Monday May 21, 10am Pacific
• Thursday May 24, 1pm Pacific
• Tuesday May 29 8:30am Pacific
• Wed. May 30, 8:30am Pacific

There's also a collection of no-registration-required white papers in PDF format on the time)spring website for your delectation. There's a mighty positive review there, which does however warn: “You do have to have IIS installed, .Net Framework and if you're using the secure mode, you'll need to setup the TMC Admins group on your system.” If you don't know what any of those things are, you should probably consult an expert before opting for this solution.

Ziff-Davis eSeminar: On-Demand Data Protection

I get invited to a lot of seminars and events related to backup and storage, and while I'm not in a position to attend most of them, it has belatedly occurred to me that I could post announcements about them here in case any of my readers are interested. Most of them are online, so it doesn't matter where you are.

On May 15th at noon Eastern Time, Ziff-Davis is sponsoring a 45-minute eSeminar about on-demand data protection. The e-mail invite reads:

Join us to hear Doug Chandler, IDC Program Director, Storage Software and Services, reveal the latest findings and trends, showing why use of on-demand data protection is growing in the SMB market, why software-as-a-service has become the preferred data protection strategy for more and more emerging businesses, and how your business can take advantage of this option now.

I'll probably register, and I might even manage to attend. Which means I'll get a follow-up phone call from Arsenal Digital, and will be disappointing yet another friendly salesperson with hopes of getting me to purchase a solution aimed at far bigger businesses than mine. (The govenrment's definition of “small business” is a bit different from that of ordinary humans.) I've lost track of the number of people to whom I've had to say “I was just researching this so I could write about it in my backup column” when they call after I download a white paper or sign up for a teleseminar.

It's too bad ZDNet's registration page doesn't include “Press” (or “Blogger,” or “Student”) among the possible job titles for attendees. “Other” isn't really very helpful to companies in determining whether it's worth making a phone call to try to close a sale.

Backup School—Coming to a City Near You

Storage Decisions is sponsoring a free "Backup School" seminar with Curtis Preston (of whom I've never heard, but that doesn't mean anything, as most backup specialists are not household names, even in geeky households like mine). The tour starts on the West Coast in March (San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle), then moves to the South in April (Atlanta, Charlotte), the Midwest in August (Chicago, Columbus, Toronto), and the East Coast in October (Washington DC, Philadelphia, Boston, New York). Okay, yes, I know, Toronto is not in the Midwest, or at least not as the US defines it. But it's a much nicer place to have an event than Detroit is.

Topics include backup configuration blunders, a vendor showcase, and encryption. The event is from 8 AM until 4 PM. It's sponsored by EMC, Symantec, Syncsort, CommVault, Copan, Daymark, and Atempo, which should give you an idea of what kind of solutions they'll be discussing. (That is, mostly not the home office kind.)

Hat tip to Anil Gupta for pointing this out on his blog.