One of the services that the company I work for provides is a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Program (BCDRP) that is tailor-made for offices based in various parts of the Philippines.

Practically speaking, in the Philippines there is no such thing as 100% uptime for any office, unless it has generators that automatically kick in when the power goes out. Even when the building that houses the office itself is backed up by a generator, there is the question of availability of backup power for the individual servers.

Not all offices, especially startup ones, can avail themselves of backup servers, much less of Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) units that can sustain a server’s activity until power is restored. There are various ways in which a building, or the entire area where the building is located, can lose power. A cut transmission line, a blown up power transformer—these contribute to the uncertainty of when power can be restored. And when there is uncertainty, no UPS or backup generator will be enough to keep a server running.

With the loss of power for some key areas also comes loss of internet connection. When this happens, no automated, remote controlled monitoring and management can occur. A company offering BCDRP services that are fully automated, can rely on automation only for as long as the power and Internet is up. Once they both come down, and there are no warm bodies to kick in, then there is a problem.

This is where our BCDRP program becomes practical. Every day we send out a team that goes around from one client to another, replacing backup external disks and taking the previous night’s backups away for safekeeping offsite. This is on top of remote server backup and management that we also perform.

This is practical BCDRP for the third world.

One of the niftier things I’ve encountered recently is the Retractable USB Charge Cable, which has versions for the more popular brands of mobile phones and handsets. That’s the one you see on the left (in its retracted state) in the picture above. That’s my tried and tested (meaning old) Sony Ericsson P910i in the middle, and its accompanying wall charger (with adaptor) on the right. If you are the type that availed yourself of travel deals, hitting the road with portable wifi and a laptop, the retractable USB charger would be the better bet over the wall charger, in terms of portability. Precious space in a traveling kit can be reclaimed and used for something else, like maybe an extra mouse or whatever it is people with laptops throw into their bags when they travel. I’d settle for road food.

I got the charger from our office for P150, but the other models may be a bit more expensive than that. There’s lots of photos of the other models and other stuff that this company sells, on their website here.

Having just signed up with PayPal I have been paying close attention to emails I receive whenever I modify details on my account.

While I was scouring my Gmail Spam folders for emails that may have been inadvertently caught, I found one that should be a great concern to other PayPal users like me. It’s an email message that looks exactly like official correspondence from PayPal, but on closer scrutiny proves to be a phishing scam.

Phishing is a form of Internet fraud that aims to steal valuable information such as credit cards, social security numbers, user IDs and passwords and the like.

This particular email apparently from PayPal aroused suspicion as soon as I saw it.

• Reason #1: I did not register for PayPal with my gmail account.
• Reason #2: The link URL’s that show on my browser’s status bar tell me that the links embedded in this email are NOT authentic PayPal links, but were made to appear like they are.

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