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Many businesses can’t afford to lose power for an hour, let alone the week or more that many endured following this month’s ice storm. That’s why data centers that offer electronic disaster recovery to clients became popular the minute freezing rain began to fall.  “We were working 20-hour days just to get people back up,” said Mike Bacher, director of operations at Tulsa Connect.  Local data centers like Tulsa Connect and Perimeter Technology can perform many everyday services for small and midsize businesses without dedicated tech departments, such as server storage and Web site hosting. But when the lights go out, businesses can also turn to the data centers to keep basic operations running.  “Customers can bring their work stations, and we set them up,” said Micah Moseley, director of sales for Perimeter Technology.

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After Hurricane Katrina, businesses pursued disaster recovery (DR) and business continuation strategies in earnest. The result is many more companies today are better prepared than they were two years ago. However, some of the traditional DR pitfalls remain.  This is because disaster recovery plans operate on the back burner when everything is going well and take center stage when the company is flung headlong into disaster. Most of the time, DR does not gain the ear of C-level executives until a business interruption strikes. The planning and the execution of data recoveries are orchestrated by mid-level personnel in IT and business operations. The bottom line: disaster recovery plans operate like “insurance policies” that only become valuable when a company runs into disaster — although industry regulators, legal experts and others have now placed new demands on sites.

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Three-year data from the largest, multi-center, prospective voluntary registry on any procedure for benign uterine fibroids showed that 90 percent of the women participating avoided a hysterectomy and of these, 85 percent had a substantial improvement in symptoms and quality of life. The registry included three-year data on 1,278 patients from 26 sites who had this minimally invasive interventional radiology treatment for symptomatic fibroids, showing uterine fibroid embolization is a durable treatment for fibroids with sustained improvement in quality of life and symptom relief. Twenty to 40 percent of American women age 35 and older, and nearly 50 percent of pre-menopausal African American women, have uterine fibroids. Of the 600,000 hysterectomies performed annually in the United States, one-third of these are to relieve symptoms caused by fibroids.

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Just ahead of CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, SanDisk has announced thier new Cruzer Titanium Plus 4 gig USB flash drive with automatic online backup. The service works with Windows Vista, XP and Windows 2000 machines. Simply plug in the USB Cruzer flash drive and copy files to it. These files will be backed up to a password protected online account. If the machine isn’t online, the drive will start the online backup process once the machine is online. 6 months of service are included, after which you’ll have to pay $30/year. The online backup service is powered by BeInSync.Beyond online backup, Cruzer Titanium Plus offers several additional data protection features:A rugged, crush-resistant metal case, reducing the risk of physical damage.Optional security by turning on password protection  with AES hardware data encryption  for all files stored on the drive, preventing other people from accessing user data if the drive is lost or stolen.Two years of free lost-and-found service from BoomerangIt, to increase the chances users will get the drive back if it’s misplaced.

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Ifollowed your suggestion and got a backup external hard drive and have done one backup with it a few months ago. How often should I add to the backup? More important, since I don’t really know what I have added since the first backup, do I just connect the hard drive and tell it to do a complete backup again? Is that workable, or will it use up the space too quickly?  - Mark Posner-  The first backup should be a complete one. After that, most backup software allows you to schedule “incremental backups.” That means that only the files that have changed are backed up after that. When it’s time to restore, the software magically combines those incremental backups with the original backup to return your data just as it was on the date of the last backup

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SanDisk Corp. unveiled a Universal Serial Bus flash drive that automatically copies files to an online backup service when plugged into any PC with an Internet connection.  The new Cruzer Titanium Plus flash drive is priced at $59.99 with 4GB of memory. It will be available in March, said the Milpitas, Calif.-based company. The online backup capability is priced at $29.99 per year. The first six months of the service are offered without charge, said a SanDisk spokesman.  The new flash-memory product replaces SanDisk’s older Cruzer Titanium line, according to SanDisk officials.  The files will be copied to Tel Aviv-based BeInSync Ltd.’s online backup service under an arrangement with SanDisk. The backup service will store up to 4GB for each product, effectively mirroring the capacity of the USB drive, said Motti Vaknin, CEO of the service provider.