The importance of good backups was driven home to me again recently when our tape drive failed and I had to replace it. I decided that it was time to upgrade our tape drive to a newer model with greater capacity as recently our backups have been requiring more than one tape. I purchased a reasonable second hand tape drive through Trademe. This drive can backup 200 gigabytes of data (or 400 gigabytes of compressed data) which is quite a step up on our previous drive which did 20gb (40gb compressed). The cost of the tape drive and some new tapes to go with it was a little under $1000.00. Well worth the expense when the alternative is possibly not being in business!
I moved on to Telecom's new XT network earlier this week and I am wondering if this is a good move. I have noticed that sometimes my phone rings when calls are incoming and sometimes it doesn't. Just a few minutes ago I received a call. The phone didn't ring - I only happened to glance down at it and see that there was a call. When I answered it, the quality was appalling. I had to step outside before I could hear the person on the other end properly. They kept fading in and out.
There has been a lot of talk about Voice Over IP (VOIP) phone systems in the past few years. A VOIP system basically allows you to make calls across a computer network (like the Internet) instead of using landlines provided by Telecom or other telecommunications companies. The cost of calls on a VOIP system can be far lower than those made through a landline provider. Obviously this is very attractive to business.