Continuing on my notes on sessions last week at the International Shelby Convention, today I’m writing about Kyle Brown’s session, “Preventative Maintenance: Tips to Keep your Server Serving You.” Kyle is the owner of Texas-based Innovative Data Solutions.

Some of the key tips Kyle provided in the session are:

• Proactive vs. Reactive. It’s more effective to do preventative maintenance in IT than to wait for things to break. If you take the time to prevent problems from happening, you won’t have to run around putting out fires. It’s less stressful, and cheaper.
• Tips on buying a new server. Kyle has several practical recommendations on buying a new server, all focus on redundancy. Make sure the server is equipped with RAID, dual power supplies, and a good UPS. He also suggests only buying new servers with good warranties, utilizing tape for nightly backups, enabling shadow copies on the volume, and using some sort of disaster recovery backup system.
• Routine Maintenance. Kyle suggests shutting down the server regularly, depending on amount of RAM, in order to fully clear the memory thus increasing system speed. His rule of thumb is for a server with 1 Gb of RAM to shut down every other week and for a server with 2 Gb of RAM to shut down once a month. He also suggests running a drive repair utility upon rebooting the server. (No word as to how often he suggest shutting down machines with more than 2 Gb).
• Software recommendations. Kyle made some recommendations for software utilities.
  1. File Recovery and Repair: OfficeRecovery, OfficeFix, and File Repair.
  2. Un-delete software and Solutions: Active Undelete, EasyRecovery, and WinUndelete.

Overall, a great session from a good man. Kyle seems to view his work as an IT consultant as his calling from God. I feel the same sort of conviction myself, and I’m sure that most of the readers of this blog do as well.

I’m curious what others think about the nightly tape backups. We’ve stopped using tape and are backing up to a NAS on the other side of the building. (I’m also doing off-site Shelby backups as well). Kyle admitted that he is somewhat obsessed about backing data up, and I’ve got to compliment him on that. Since most churches don’t have someone on staff to manage their network and data, they need a contractor who cares about their data just as much as they do.

Just a word of encouragement to churches who are looking for a good IT contractor, make a call to Kyle at IDS or Nick Nicholaou at MBS.

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