"Undelete in the Corporation part 2
Managing Deleted Files on the Network"

Complete Transcript of
Jeremy Buck - Diskeeper Interview
on Let’s Talk Computers
Host Alan Ashendorf
October 11 2008

Alan:  Today on Let’s Talk Computers we are continuing our conversation, on Undelete in the Corporation talking about how it’s absolutely necessary to always manage all deleted files anywhere on a network. Our guest today is Jeremy Buck, Spokesperson for Diskeeper Corporation. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Jeremy.

Jeremy:  Thanks again for having me

Alan:  Jeremy, the last time we were talking about how the Recycle Bin that comes with the Microsoft Operating System just does not give the protection that a corporation must have to manage and to recover deleted files anywhere on the network, and we talked about the new hard disk storage devices that could be anywhere.

But what about the specialized servers - just take your average mail server for example - a mail server is not just a distribution service. It’s deciding where this email goes to Mary and this one goes to Frank. It has to process a lot of files.

For each email that gets processed, there may be many files that get created and then deleted as the email gets passed from the virus service and from the spam service. This email may get duplicated multiple times on the hard drive and we don’t want to keep all those copies because they are throwaway copies. Sometimes you want to be able to capture deleted files and sometimes you don’t want to capture deleted files. We need a way to manage those deleted files by not saving them, therefore not taking up all that disk space.

Jeremy:  Drives keep getting larger and larger. There are more applications out there to meet that space or to start consuming that space. Anywhere that you can identify just what you want saved and what you don’t is going to help you in the long run with making sure that the free space that you have available to the drive is dedicated strictly to the things that you use most often or are most concerned with.

Alan:  So I can actually go into Undelete and set up some of the parameters that says that, "I don’t want to save temporary files" or "I don’t want to save anything that has a .bak extension" or "I don’t want this particular folder to be part of my Recovery." I can set those up any way I want to do?

Jeremy:  That’s exactly right. You can set up exclusions to eliminate particular folders or file extensions, like you pointed out. So, there is a lot of flexibility in terms of capturing certain items and not capturing others.

In fact, Undelete has so many great features to it now. We just recently released our Undelete 2009 and expounded on a lot of different items to bring it into the forefront and make it a really effective and applicable application.

Alan:  For instance, if you are using this as your print server in which the printer is basically hanging off this server, there is going to be a sub-directory out there that is going to be storing nothing but print jobs.

Jeremy:  Right.

Alan:  And why in the world do you want to be able to recover print jobs when somebody can push a button and reprint them again?

Jeremy:  That's right.

Alan:  In fact, you don't want to recover those things.

Jeremy:  You really don't. So, losing any space to that is just a waste of free space on a particular drive.

Alan:  Now, from an administrator's standpoint trying to set up on multiple servers at the same time can usually be a nightmare, but with Undelete 2009 with your Corporate Edition, you have a way of pushing out different versions of Undelete so that the administrator doesn't have to worry about all this set-up.

Jeremy:  What we have included in this 2009 Version is a Push Install feature that will push [Undelete] clients to the workstations of your choosing. What that means to you, as a system administrator is that the server, itself will have an Undelete server installation. That installation of Undelete will capture files that are deleted on the server from any volume that you define.

The client piece will actually apply to a workstation, but it really does little more than allow for a user a certain window where they can then look at the Undelete server and recover their own files. That just saves the administrator that much more time.

Probably the greatest part about that little window (the client connection that I was talking about) is that the users can still only see those files that they have permissions to see. You are not opening yourself up to have users then go scour files on the server and try to recover them or anything like that. It’s only those files that they themselves have worked with in the past.

Alan:  When you’re talking about a corporate environment you have to take in effect all the servers that are going to be in your server room and you have to take into account all the multiple workstations throughout the whole business and they would be in different cities or states as a matter of fact. All of that is part of the corporate environment and all of that is part of the administrator's job to maintain.

Jeremy:  That’s exactly right. As anybody knows, whether you’re dealing with 5 workstations or 1,000 it only takes a few seconds to make a mistake. Human error is exactly that - it’s human error. In the a case of lost files, giving people the client applications and allowing them to correct their own mistakes and get their own files back can then save the administrator that much more time. It just takes that much more concern away form the administrator in terms of addressing at least the case of lost files for all of their users.

Alan:  Well, one of the key factors that I like about Undelete 2009 is that it has a very low impact on the performance of the computers. In the past if you had any kind of Undelete product on any kind of a computer it’s going to take resources. But now you don’t take any resources, do you?

Jeremy:  We actually developed a new technology that’s really taken off and it’s hit incredibly well. It’s what we call InvisiTasking. We wanted an application that was not going to impact servers in any adverse way. As anybody knows, any resources that the server has are like the lifeblood, they are absolutely essential. Anything that you introduce to a server that could potentially be taxing on the resources, the CPU, you have to be concerned about the impact of an application.

With Undelete, what we did was we introduced or added this InvisiTasking Technology, meaning that we monitor certain resources and processes that are going on and we will only do certain operations in the background whenever the machine is fairly idle.

So, what that means to you and me is that if you were to install Undelete onto a mail server, say an Exchange Server where you cannot afford any sort of downtime, you can’t afford any sort of a "slow" in terms of the mail being parsed out to the users.

Undelete is the perfect application because we will only operate when there are certain amounts of available resources to us.

Alan:  That’s the way it has to work because any time that you put any kind of applications even on a workstation and it starts slowing down the work station the first thing any user does is find a way to turn it off.

Jeremy:  Yes.

Alan:  That defeats the whole purpose, doesn’t it?

Jeremy:  It really does. You can’t really blame the administrators out there because CPU and the resources that they have available to them, whether it be the memory that they add to a machine. It tends to get expensive; it’s a vital commodity. For anybody that works with an intense machine that is intensive on certain processes, they have got to know any sort of overhead is a huge detriment.

We’re in a tough economy; it’s not as though – in the past it was simple enough to throw CPU at the problem. We would just say, "Let’s just bump up the CPU to whatever we can possibly afford and therefore we don’t have to worry about it." But, in today’s day and age, you really have to be conservative with the amount that you are spending on the machine. So, for any application that is going to run at a real low level and not get in the way of any of your work is going to be of benefit.

Alan:  Plus the fact that if you’re talking about a server environment you’re talking about multiple hard drives. There are times where you want to be able to set aside say one hard drive to be nothing more than your Undelete drive so that everything that gets deleted on any of the other drives does not stay on the drive that was deleted on; it gets moved over to this Undelete drive and it doesn’t hog up any resources or disk space.

Jeremy:  You’re right. And you know it’s an interesting turn in that more recently I’ve seen where people will dedicate a fairly small "C" Drive, but then they will have these other volumes that maybe this "C" Drive is partitioned to another volume that has a larger amount of space. Or they will add one very large volume - let’s say a one terabyte drive and that is where they intend to do most of their data shares. It’s getting that sort of size so that there is no concern in terms of the free space that is being used.

The nicest part about Undelete is you have the ability or the flexibility to either save deleted files onto the drives that deleted them originally or you can set what we call a "common bin," meaning, "I want to capture files from the “C” Drive, the "D" Drive, and the "E" Drive and save them to my "F" Drive so that in terms of the space consumption or the free space consumption is really only applicable to the "F" Drive.

That just adds that much more flexibility and you don’t have to be too concerned about that smaller "C" Drive suddenly filling up or having it lost in any sort of way.

Alan:  Usually when we talk about a utility program (because that’s what Undelete is), Undelete 2009 is a utility program that allow administrators to administrate what is going on with their servers and their networks. How easy is it to set up?

Jeremy:  It is incredibly easy. With Undelete 2009 you can install it on the fly, without the necessity for a reboot. We certainly do understand and sympathize that for certain machines like in the case of mail servers - there’s just no maintenance period to bring a machine down. So you can install it and start running on the fly.

You can immediately configure what drives you want to maintain. If there is one that you could care less about, you can certainly turn off the Recovery Bin, as we call it. You can then start defining the functionality in terms of "Here are the files that I want to keep," or "Here are the exclusions (the files and folders that you don’t want to keep)."

You can start defining things like the age that you want to set certain files to. If in one particular area you want to have files kept for 30 days just to be absolutely certain that if somebody hasn’t found that they have deleted a file or need a file to be gotten back within 30 days, you can feel pretty safe in purging those out. You can set certain dates like so that Undelete will start purging itself. There is a lot of flexibility

Alan:  If somebody would like to find more information about your new Undelete 2009, both the Server Edition and also the Consumer Editions, where would they go?

Jeremy:  You can visit www.undelete.com

Alan:  Jeremy, we’re out of time and we didn’t really get a chance to talk about some of the ways that Undelete 2009 makes it easier than ever to recover these files that have been deleted and captured on our network. We look forward to continuing this conversation next time.

Jeremy:  Thanks so much, Alan.