Quick Bytes IT Stuff

Creating a backup is a must if not a necessity for a SysAdmin job. Backup doesn't need to be complex or needs a very powerful software to do a backup. At the end of the day, whether it's a good commercial software creating a backup; what it does in the background is create another copy of the file or folders that needs to be backed up. So, for that reason a simple copy command with the existing tool in Windows can do a job also for some simple backup like logs or other files. Why need to backup the logs? In a security perspective and audit purposes, logs are very important. Of course, it will also depend on the contents of the log whether it is quite detailed or important data is captured like username, IP Address, time, files and folder being accessed and other data. Problems or issues may not be detected in real-time or issues maybe notice at a later time but the action that cause the issue happened some time ago as well, in which the only witness are the logs. A simple batch...

Backup is a simple word that has a very good significant value in today’s digital world. Unattended backup or automated backup is a good strategy, so the user or the whoever is managing the backup won't need to manually trigger the backup. No data backup is a head-on strategy, that leads to catastrophe. Backup is very, very important in today’s digital world. You will never know when a data disaster will strike. The whole laptop will be lost, the hard drive will fail without any sign, a virus might corrupt the whole system or just simple mistake to overwrite or delete a data. All this scenario requires a backup rescue to recover the data. Robocopy is a built-in command in Windows that does a pretty awesome job to backup or copy files. Using Windows task scheduler, robocopy and Vbscript will create an important task to backup data. How the three tools will be used, to backup data? Robocopy – to backup or copy the files Vbscript – to hide the roboco...

Office 365 PowerPoint shows an error contact system administrator when opening the file. The error if interpreted literally shows that a system administrator is needed to fix the issue due to a security or permissions issue. Notification errors or any errors that are displayed to inform the user that some processes have gone wrong while processing or opening the file are quite helpful to begin troubleshooting. But some errors are quite generic or does not really point to what type of solution should be done to resolve the issue. Literally interpreting the error to resolve the issue sometimes work but sometimes it won’t work as well. For this error it seems like a permission issue but it’s not. The first thing to try to eliminate the issue is to open the file manually, like going to “File”, select “Open”, then browse to the folder location of the file and open the file. If the file can be opened, then security issue or permission issue is not a concern. ...

Migrating or copying files to another server and retaining the permissions is a common task when migrating a file server. If all permissions are successfully retained it will make the migration seamless and nobody will ever notice that a migration has taken place. If there are shared folders and with different permissions, re-sharing the folder by scratch is just time consuming and giving access denied to users will be inevitable. But how to copy files and folders, like it was exactly done on the old server? In Windows environment, just 3 steps are needed. 3 steps sound easy and quick. Steps below will work for NTFS permissions and folder access rights solely depends on it. a.       Copy the files to the new server and retaining its permissions while files and folders are being copied b.       Export the shares registry (old server) c.       Import the shares registry (new server) ...

Copy a single file using robocopy from a local folder to a shared folder on the network. A simple rule of thumb before any disaster strike, don't interchange the source and the destination. If source and destination is mistakenly reverse, files might get overwritten. To avoid any loss of data do a test with a dummy file to ensure things work perfectly. Robocopy [source]    [destination]   [file to be copied] robocopy c:\local_c_folder  \\PC_network\shared_folder   file_to_be_copied_xx.txt The command will be completed successfully provided the network access right has no issues. Robocopy works quite good on large files. A simple copy or xcopy command will also work but the speed might vary. However, if the file (ex. an ISO file) and is more than 4GB and the filesystem  of the thumbdrive or the storage is FAT system, then robocopy or any methods of copying will not work. Since FAT has a file size limitation of less than 3GB. Roboco...

How to export Task Scheduler jobs in Windows? Windows has provided a graphical interface to export Task scheduler job. But the graphical interface allows exporting one selected job only. It does not allow exporting more than one. Which basically means importing of task scheduler jobs, can be done one by one only. See image below on how to export a task in Windows. Where to find Task Scheduler jobs? Tasks scheduler jobs can be found on c:\windows\system32\tasks folder.   To open a particular tasks just type notepad plus the filename. The command prompt should be open at an elevated mode. It will open the job and in XML format. See image below: If you have quite a few tasks running on a server or different servers which runs different tasks job. It's gonna be fun to do it manually and I guess Microsoft expect Windows System Administrator to have some fun once in a while.   It has to be done manually al...