There is a whole cottage industry out there willing to provide anyone looking to get into the Cisco ‘field’ with equipment, advice, etc… My advice is for you to spend a little time getting to know Cisco’s wonderful Packet Tracer program, found here: http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/netacad/course_catalog/PacketTracer.html

Nothing beats getting hands on experience with Cisco gear (highly recommend the Cisco 3640 router and if you can swing it, the 2960 switch). The 2960 is CCNP level and can also be used for the CCNA certification track. Essentially, killing two birds with one stone.

Unfortunately, work is challenging and my time is limited so… keep your fingers crossed that I find a little time in the next few weeks to pull the trigger. It’s nothing to write home to mom about. Just different than what I have now and will hopefully look decent on a Windows machine using Internet Explorer (that sorry excuse for a browser).

Face it, your life’s memories sit on a hard drive. Memories tend to elicit emotions that run the gamut – imagine the emotion of losing those memories. I’m instantly mortified. I can see all my memories gone forever. Am I sad? Sure. Mortification turns to panic pretty quick. That pretty much defines the task Data Robotics has indirectly on top of their day job of keeping your data safe. Needless to say, when a person thinks their memories are gone forever, calm and rational are not the emotions at the top of the pecking order.

The situation I describe in the previous paragraph is the predicament I encountered a few weeks back. Fortunately, I utilize more than one method of backup. Doubly fortunate for me that my computing platform of choice (Mac) has a wonderful utility called ‘Time machine’ that does an admirable job. However, while time machine is fine for a quick recovery here and there, it’s not the solution for optimum safety and redundancy.

With backup, the key is redundancy. The drobo makes backup easy. You plug the drobo in to an electrical outlet, plug it into your computer and finally, pop the drives into your drobo. That’s all you do. It takes your data and spreads it over several drives, for redundancy. It also does this automagically. You don’t need intimate knowledge of RAID arrays, or anything technical. It does all the difficult, mundane and boring stuff for you. It makes an incredibly complex and difficult task as easy as turning something on and plugging something in.

Ok, back to things going wrong. In very short order I had three drives go bad and it appeared my drobo was acting weird. I’m writing this article while I await the arrival of my replacement drobo. I wanted to take a few minutes to share a few lessons I learned about this experience:

I’ve been incredibly impressed with the support from the people of Data Robotics. You have real people trying to make a great product, improve the safety of our digital lives and do it with kindness and humility.

Is it Data Robotics fault that hard drives sometimes fail? No, it’s not. They’re taking a bad situation and attempting to make the experience of something that fails into an experience of “we’ve got your back”. How many companies can you say that about?

One plugin that stands above the crowd (at least for me) is Gravity Forms. It makes creating forms a snap. I sent a question to their support email and received a response inside of 5 minutes. No idea if that’s the norm but I was impressed.

Speaking of being impressed… creating a form only took me a matter of minutes. I’ve been playing around with it and I’m truly blown away by just how simple it is to use.

Do yourself a favor… if you work with wordpress and create a lot of forms, you’ll really want to check out Gravity Forms. It’s a real time saver.