Patriot Tech Services Inc. Blog

There’s no denying that your business’s productivity suite is one of its most valuable software solutions. Cloud services like Google Apps for Work and Microsoft Office 365 continue to be huge game-changers in the business environment, and it’s been found that their increasing popularity is thanks to the convenience of providing mobile access to important data and applications.

Google Drive, available for both iOS and Android, is continuously being updated with new features and functionality. One of the most interesting features is the ability to take a picture of a document, and store the file in Drive as a PDF. Plus, if the file has text, it will be compatible with Drive’s search function.

This feature, while great for quickly storing a file in your Drive account, has certain requirements which limit its functionality. For users of iOS, you’re out of luck; this feature is only present for Android users. Also worth noting is that Android doesn’t recognize handwriting as text, so it cannot be searched for with Drive’s search function. Regardless, it’s a handy tool to have on your smartphone that you’ll want to be familiar with.

Create PDFs in Google Drive
To scan a document and convert it to a PDF in Google Drive, follow these steps with your Android smartphone.

• Open the Google Drive app.
• Tap the red plus button on the bottom right-hand side of the screen.
• Select the Scan option. It will look like a camera icon.
• Take a picture of the document you want to upload.
• Once you’ve taken the photo, you have a couple of options:n
  • Tap the checkmark icon to save it in your Drive.
  • Select the Redo icon if you want to take a better picture.
  • Tap the plus button to scan another page to the file.
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• Once it’s been saved, you can use Drive’s search form to search the non-handwritten text in the document.

You can imagine that there are several situations where this might come in handy. Here are a few of them:

• If you’re on a business trip and don’t have access to a computer, you can easily snap a picture of a document and upload it to your Google Drive account.
• You can easily store receipts from trips for later viewing and documentation, and give accounting access to your Drive account.
• Basically, this feature is useful any time you’re not within arm’s reach of a printer with a scanning function.

What are some other ways that you can think of to take advantage of this PDF converting feature? Be sure to share them with us in the comments, and subscribe to our blog for more great tips and tricks.

It’s every business owner’s worst nightmare: one mistake, and all of their data is wiped out. This very situation happened recently to a hosting provider, and his story serves as a cautionary tale in regard to data storage best practices.

Hosting provider Marco Marsala was brought under fire after he posted on a server forum seeking advice for dealing with a catastrophic error he made while trying to erase a few files. Stating that he had utilized the “rm -rf” command with undefined variables, he had inadvertently destroyed all data on the computer. What’s worse, his backups were mounted to the computers and were wiped as well.

This is actually a similar blunder that Pixar experienced, almost deleting Toy Story 2 prior to its release.

As a result, everything Marsala had for his company was destroyed (including the websites he had created and hosted for his 1,535 customers) with no backups surviving to restore from.

Needless to say, the responses from other users on the forum were decidedly negative - a few dismissed the possibility of his company surviving the error, and others questioned his abilities as a programmer. One poster recommended Marsala seek legal counsel rather than technical advice, as he predicted that Marsala was “going out of business.”

There was a consensus on the feed that the best chance for any data recovery was to recruit the help of a data recovery firm. Fortunately for Marsala, such a data recovery company was able to recover his files and his biggest hit was financial--both from the recovery company’s fees and from the reduced income due to the loss of business he suffered.

By neglecting to follow best practices in regard to backups, Marsala essentially invited this disaster to strike. Following basic best practices would have mitigated much, if not all, of Marsala’s problem. What happened to his data is exactly the reason that all data backups should be kept offline, isolated from the original file on a separate system.

Without such measures in place your data is subject to not only human error, as was the case here, but also other dangers. Fire, electrical surges, accidental equipment damage, theft, all of these events have the potential to jeopardize data that’s critical to your business.

Are your data backups as secure as they should be? Do you even have a backup and disaster recovery solution put into place? Be certain by calling Patriot Tech Services Inc. at (877) 874-4629. Our experts can advise you on what your business needs to survive the worst disasters, and assure that you and your clients’ information are prepared for anything.

Smartphone technology is currently experiencing cool innovations. Plus, there are some crazy reasons behind what these devices can and can’t do that you may not have known about. Check out these four cool smartphone factoids from List25.

If your business is using Windows 10 on your workstations, you might have noticed that there are plenty of advertisements geared toward marketing some product or service to users. These advertisements can get annoying. We’ll show you how to turn off the lock screen ads that appear before you log in.