Fazza

You dont say if the PC is a Desktop or Laptop PC - if it's a Desktop PC could you not buy a firewire card for it?

We asked O2 about this at my last place as in the warehouse there was no signal but plenty as soon as you went outside. They said £10,000 was a starting price and we stopped listening after that!

I didnt think it logged file deletions so didnt bother looking at it.

Does it have a name this 'Microsoft one' please? For us the main thing we need to see is who has deleted what files and when.

Never managed to find an open source program that does this as we also have a budget of £0 for this sort of thing! The full version of Netwrix is great but prohibitively expensive

This keeps on happening with this silly program: The tape drive that is in the Dell PowerVault 124T keeps on disappearing in SCDPM. Rescan/Refresh eventually makes the tape drive reappear, as a stand-alone drive (which it is not as it is physically in the 124T). A reboot of the server normally solves the issue and SCDPM once again sees that the drive is inside the tape library and will then backup to tape once again. Why does it keep doing this and how can I stop it from doing it again as it's messing up the tape backups as it wont do them when it's like this?

According to the regulations, laptops should be inspected not tested (as most will have a label on them saying that they are officially ITE) and then a sticker saying if it passed or failed stuck on to it. A PAT tester should only test what the company/school wants them to test and if you have decided not to follow what the IET says then that's completely up to you, not for the PAT testers to tell you what to test!

Ask them for the results of that cable and what test/inspection that did on the cable. We gave up with employing PAT testing companies when they PAT tested/inspected plastic monitor stands - the CEO and engineer came in to answer questions about all the ones the somehow tested/inspected and neither could give an answer to why they had tested lumps of plastic! Now we do the PAT testing ourselves - it takes longer but it's done properly so we're safer than we've ever been.

It's also free! And very quick to restore files/folders.

Thanks for the replies so far. They have what we want at a price that we like so I don't have any techie questions for them. They've told me that anything over £1,000 has 12 months warranty and under £1,000 it is 6 months warranty - quite a simple way to do the warranties which I guess saves them time so they can just put what they have on their website and sell it!

Looking for a refurbished tape library and seen a couple on http://www.itinstock.com so I was wondering if anyone has used them and if they are a reputable company or not? I'm sure they are but as we've never heard of them before it would be nice to hear feedback from anyone who has purchased things from them in the past...

Sounds like you're after a Wireless Memory Stick - Sandisk do them.

Occasionally the tape drive in our Dell tape library disappeared from DPM - in most cases simply clicking on the tape library in DPM and then hitting the Refresh button brings it back. The only issue is, whilst it's missing, any tape backups fail and can only be resumed once the refresh has taken place. Not sure if I've dreamt this is or not, but in the back of my mind I seem to recall there was a way of scheduling a refresh periodically to minimise this from happening but I cant see any settings within DPM nor any results from a search on the internet about it. Have I indeed dreamt this missing feature or is there a way of doing this that I've forgotten about?

Depends on if it is for Staff or Student machines. Our student build is around 60GB so we go for the 120GB ones as that is future-proof enough for them as there is no user data saved on them. Whereas for Staff the build size is significantly less but they do save data on their (in conjunction with redirected folders to OneDrive) so we go for at least a 240GB SSD for them.

We went to do a restore today of a student's work from January but we can't see any restore points! As you can see from the screenshot, we have Restore Points from April 2018, May 2018, June 2018 and July 2018 - where have August, September, October, November and then January gone? We have 2 weeks backing up to disk and then over the weekend it puts it on tape which is why you can see in the screenshot Restore Points for the 1st and 8th of March 2019 but not any other days during those weeks. We have 104 tapes in the safe so I know the restore points are on tape but why are they not showing up in DPM any more, where have they gone and how do I get them back??

I'm really looking forward to The Outer Worlds - in case you've not heard it's the 'Fallout' game we've all been waiting for except it's not a Fallout game at all (it is but they cant say it is). The original creators of Fallout and Obsidian (best know for Fallout: New Vegas) have been working on The Outer Worlds and it's due for release this year - the trailer looks amazing:

Didnt realise this was on so I shall watch it on the iPlayer this evening...

Just checked and I can't see it either so it's either been renamed as something else, they have a glitch or there's a major issue with it!! Just need to work out which is the correct answer...

Yes. No more or less than a standard hard disk drive. Only difference is (for us anyway) is that when we've had physical disks die we have an 80% success rate in using data recovery software to get at least some work off of the hard disk before it completely dies. With the SSDs that have failed we have a 0% success rate as when they're dead, they're dead. We use SSDs on the student machines where no personal data is stored on the machines as everything is redirected to their home folders on the network. We use OneDrive on all staff laptops that have SSDs drives in them and redirect Documents, Desktop, Downloads, Photos and Videos etc. so if there is a failure with the SSD then all data has been automatically backed up. One plus thing for SSDs is that (sadly but not surprisingly) we get a lot of dropped staff laptops here, I have one on the workbench at the moment. If it had been an SSD then in this scenario it would have been more likely that no damage had occurred on the drive and I'd be able to get any data on it off it and transferred to a replacement laptop, unfortunately it's not an SSD and after it finally accepting the BitLocker recovery key, it tries to tell me that it needs formatting before I can use it! It's currently 12+ hours in to running chkdsk on it, it has found and fixed some errors but is only 84% of the way through the check so we'll have to wait and see if I have any luck or not as this teacher (despite all the staff training sessions by fellow teachers and numerous emails) she didn't get OneDrive set up on her laptop.

Looking at upgrading our DPM server to SCDPM 2019 this Easter half-term so I was wondering if anyone had already taken the plunge and if so, are there any gotchas/issues we should be aware of or did it all go swimmingly and backups are fine? The reason we're looking to upgrade SCDPM is because I'd like to upgrade our VMs from Server 2012/2012R2/2016 to 2019 but as it's not supported in our current SCDPM server I need to upgrade SCDPM first but dont want to do it if everyone is having issues with it.

If you're selling a refurbished computer with Windows on it then for it to be legit you need to purchase a Microsoft Authorised Refurbisher Windows license I believe. It's that program your company needs to find out about. The OEM license is for the original purchaser and technically/legally when it's sold on the license is invalid and the new owner needs to buy a license.

We use two different models, this one is for general air-dusting: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dusters-CompuCleaner-Xpert-Electric-Duster/dp/B01G1Z0RF0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1553176281&sr=8-1&keywords=IT+Dusters+CompuCleaner+Xpert This one is a beast! You need to ensure you are holding on to the hose/nozzle if you put it on the the higher setting else it waves around frantically like a firemans hose!!! https://www.amazon.co.uk/Xpower-1000-Electric-Duster-Vacuum-black/dp/B01NBVOCXP/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1553176266&sr=8-1&keywords=Xpower+A-5+1000+Watt%2C+Electric+Air+Duster+%26+Vacuum

It all depends on what your School/Academy's procurement policy is - each school/academy is different. Ours doesn't even mention OJEU but when I worked in FE, it did so a few times we had to do that.

I installed it on a Hyper-V VM so it's really cheap for us as it's free!!

Snipe-IT might be worth a look as you could just add accessories (rather than actual assets) and set up locations (i.e. room numbers) so you book in a delivery of exerciser books for example so Snipe-IT would show the quantity of boxes/packs you have etc. and then when you get your staff to sign in they can then book out an accessory (i.e. 1 box/pack of exercise books) to either a room or person. Snipe-IT will then reduce the quantity of of them by the number you booked out and simply shows you how many boxes/packs you have left. You can then do a search on the books and see where they have all been given or sent to depending on if you sent it to a room or named person.