Fortinet Unified Threat Management

Fortinet makes a wide variety of security products. Fortinet's security fabric can intelligently protect your entire network: from the endpoint to the cloud and everywhere in between, delivering industry-leading, end-to-end simplified security that won't slow you down.

We focus on the Fortinet Unified Threat Management devices, the Fortigate line, that combine the functions of firewall, switch, virus scanner, intrusion prevention and much more. Every small business needs to protect itself from and disable all threats at the edge of the network, as well as to control the actions of users with business policies that help insure productivity in a safe environment.

We have come to really appreciate the FortiWiFi products which economically integrate a WiFi access point into the firewall, making the security administration seamless. Additional access points can be added to the network for a wireless mesh environment.

You can read more about the latest threat outbreaks on this Fortinet website.

Fortinet is a key element in the line of security products we offer our customers, along with Kaspersky Lab antivirus and Retrospect Backup software.

See more information about Fortigate in the sections below.

We have been users, resellers and fans of Microlite BackupEdge software for several decades now. If you're using nearly any version of Linux or SCO Unix, BackupEdge is the best choice for you. The companion program, RecoverEdge (which is included), creates recovery media that you can use to rebuild an entire system. You can do that as a reconfiguration project (upgrading hard drives) or rebuilding a crashed server.

Nearly any reasonable backup media choice can be selected, including the following:

• NAS / FTP / NFS resources
• RDX drives and changers
• Amazon S3 Cloud resources
• LTO tape drives and changers
• DVD or CD drives
• Many, many older technology devices

We have set up most of these devices for testing and real time production backups, and can provide expert support for your system. BackupEdge has pulled our fat out of the fire more than once.

You will be able to define Master, Incremental or Differential backups for simple or complex scheduled backup tasks. Informative reports are generated when scheduled events occur with full information about success or failure of the job, and may be printed or emailed to you.

Backups may be encrypted if you're legally required to do so, such as to meet HIPAA standards. The encryption module is an extra charge, but the modest expense is certainly worth the peace of mind.

Our favorite story about Edge is this: Several years ago, one of our customers was using BackupEdge, running on a nightly scheduled backup. The server crashed and when we replaced the hard drive and began to restore the backup, we found that the most recent backup was made on a tape cartridge that had a bad spot about 1/3 of the way through. BackupEdge restored the archive to that point, displayed an error on the screen, then read past the bad spot on the tape and resumed the restore. By comparing the list of files on the tape and on the system, we were able to identify the single file that occupied the flawed spot on the tape and reinstall it from other media. In our experience, most other backup programs will simply stop and refuse to continue with an error such as this. Our customer would have lost a full day's worth of data, but as it happened they lost nothing. BackupEdge tries to succeed, and that's worth every penny of its modest cost. That customer has since retired, the business closed and the building demolished, but it is still a notable event.

Microlite BackupEdge is the backup solution of choice for Linux and Unix systems. Please contact us for more information and a quote.

Visit the Microlite site.

Why We Like Retrospect

We first used this software in 1989 and after several rather painful experiences with competing Windows backup software programs, we came back to Retrospect.  In the early days, it was known as Intelligent Backup, then as Dantz software, but the underlying concept of how backups should work remained the same.  This is a very resilient utility.

Our conclusion regarding how most Windows backup solutions work, is that they default to failure.  They will fail to properly aaccess backup media, fail to allow you to setup a backup job that executes, fail to perform the backup on schedule and fail to notify you when they fail to work.

Retrospect does none of these things; this program wants your backup to be successful.  Although there are certainly challenges when it comes to setting up the program because of its flexibility and the number of options, at the end of the setup wizard you'll have a good backup.

Retrospect works with Windows and Mac operating systems.  It will backup to nearly any hardware device, as well as other storage or cloud resources. The latest versions, beginning with Retrospect 11, supports every modern version of Windows. As Retrospect has ramped up development efforts in recent years the new releases have come fast and furious, with new features pouring out of development. If you're not sure the program will work on your system, please download and install a trial version.

Features

There are several features of Retrospect that make it a unique program.  Since it predates most of the programs currently on the market, effective techniques were developed very early in the personal computer era that have proven reliable.  

When a Retrospect backup is created the program builds a catalog of files that need to be backed up.  It maintains aged versions of each file, according to your settings. When a backup completes, it builds a snapshot, which is simply a list of files. It also performs deduplication; it won't backup the same, unchanged file multiple times.

When it's time to restore, simply open up the snapshot of backup of the day you want to restore, browse through a tree of files in that snapshot and check off the files or directories you want to restore.  The program will prompt you for the media which is necessary to restore the files you've selected. You can also restore an entire snapshot over a running system.

The only crime you can commit is to destroy media when you think it's no longer needed.  To address this, the program allows you to move backup volumes from one type of media to another, so you may want to move disk backups to tape for archival, or from disk to disk, or from disk to cloud. You can make backups to the cloud or nearly any kind of media. Losing a catalog is solved by simply rebuilding the catalog.

This is a program you should try.