Archive for March, 2015

World Backup Day – Here’s how we make MIDAS backups easy

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March 31, 2015
World Backup Day 2015

Today is World Backup Day. This annual event raises the awareness of the importance of keeping your critical digital files and data regularly backed-up.

A “backup” is a secondary copy of all your important files. Important files may include for example, your family photos, home videos, documents and emails.

Instead of keeping a single copy just in one place (like your computer), the idea is to also keep a secondary copy of everything somewhere else as well. So if anything should happen to the originals, you’ll have a backup copy elsewhere.

We strongly believe in the importance of regularly backing-up data you can’t afford to loose. In fact, we’ve built in several backup features to our room booking and resource scheduling software to do just that!

MIDAS Backups

MIDAS seamlessly makes a complete automated backup of its own database upon the first successful login each and every day. These database backups are compressed. Each compressed backup typically takes less than 1MB each in disk space. Backups and stored on the server where your MIDAS resides for a period of time you specify, typically 7-30 days.

To further protect your data, these automated daily backups can optionally also be emailed to a pre-defined email address daily too. This allows you to retain your own “off-site” backup copy of your database too!

We also provide the ability to generate instant “on demand” backups at any time. A backup can be generated by simply clicking on a “Backup” button. We really couldn’t make it easier to backup your MIDAS data if we tried! You’ll find this button via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Database → Backup Now.

Database backups (whether generated manually or automatically) can be easily and readily restored – either partially or in full – at any time. Backups can be restored via the simple user interface available through MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Database → Restore. So, should you ever wish to “roll back” your MIDAS system to an earlier point in time, or if you suffer a massive server failure and loose data, you can quickly get your MIDAS system back up and running!

Backup and Restore in MIDAS

For more information on the powerful backup/restore features of MIDAS, please see mid.as/help/manage-database-settings

For our “cloud hosted” customers (who don’t run MIDAS on their own infrastructure), we also take complete database backups daily. These are then stored off-site for a period of six months.

Emergency MIDAS Access

What’s more, we also offer an “Emergency Access” addon for our cloud hosted customers, which we’ve recently improved. This optional addon allows users to access a “real-time” backup of their hosted MIDAS system in event that they are ever unable to access their primary MIDAS system. These backups run on different servers, in different data centers, via different ISPs to that of our Primary Servers.

So, as you can see from all the above features and procedures we’ve built into our software, we take backups very seriously! And we make it painlessly easy to ensure your important MIDAS booking data can easily and readily be backed up and restored with the minimum of fuss!

But on World Backup Day today, whilst your MIDAS data is taken care of, why not take a moment to backup your own important personal files – your family photos, home videos, documents and emails too!? Yes, it may be a little time consuming, but you’ll be glad you did should anything happen to the originals!

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Improved Emergency Access addon for Hosted customers

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March 29, 2015

Emergency Access Addon Unlike the vast majority of our competitors, we offer two editions of our MIDAS web based room booking and resource scheduling software to meet the particular needs of all our customers.

Some customers prefer to download, install, and run MIDAS from their own server/infrastructure, so that they have complete control over their MIDAS system – we call this our “self hosted” edition.

Other customers prefer a completely managed system hosted in the “cloud” so they don’t have to worry about installation and updates – we call this our “remotely hosted” edition, and you can compare the difference between these two editions here.

We know that for our “remotely hosted” customers, maintaining 24/7/365 access to their booking information is crucial to the smooth running of their business operations. We therefore strive to make every reasonable effort within our control to ensure 100% uptime of our cloud servers and infrastructure.

However, as with any IT infrastructure, in the unlikely event that unforeseen circumstances arise which are beyond our control, 100% uptime can never be guaranteed. We are, for instance, reliant on external data centers and ISPs to provide us with infrastructure and services to then allow us to provide hosted MIDAS services to our customer. Our ISPs guarantee us 99.9% uptime of their infrastructure and services.

We actively monitor this to ensure that these high standards are met, and over the course of last year (2014) the combined total downtime for our hosted customers for the entire year was less than 10 hours.

That’s not a lot, and exceeds the 99.9% uptime guarantee we’re given. However, we fully appreciate that if any downtime were to occur at a crucial time of the day for our hosted customers, however brief, that this can cause implications for the day-to-day running of their operations.

That’s why, ever since we first launched MIDAS back in 2006, we’ve also offered all our hosted customers an optional “Emergency Access” addon.

Secondary Emergency Access URL With this optional addon, our hosted customers are provided with a secondary “Emergency URL” in addition to the primary URL used to access their hosted MIDAS system. At this secondary “Emergency URL”, a completely separate MIDAS system runs on a separate server, in a different data center, though a different ISP. Each day, the customer’s “live” system is automatically backed up to their “Emergency URL” to ensure that data in their backup system is never more than 24 hours behind their live system.

This means that should there ever be any issues affecting our customer’s ability to access to their primary scheduling system, with this addon, they’ll still be able to access all their booking and scheduling information via their secondary “Emergency URL”.

Over the weekend, we’ve now improved our Emergency Access addon in the following ways:

  1. Data is now backed up in “real-time” from customer’s “live” systems to their secondary Emergency Access URL (with their global MIDAS settings backed up every hour). Previously, data and settings were only backed up once per day.
  2. We’ve invested heavily in new infrastructure for our hosted customer’s Emergency Access backup systems. This means significantly faster server performance, should customers ever need to access their Emergency Access systems.

The price for this Emergency Access addon is only £89/year GBP ($139/year USD, $179/year AUD, $169/year CAD, €129/year EUR*) and certainly worth it for the piece of mind it provides knowing you’ll still be able to access your data in the event of any issues affecting our primary servers/infrastructure.

What’s more, for a limited time**, we’re offering 10% off our Emergency Access addon to all existing customers with remotely hosted MIDAS system who don’t already have it! To take advantage of this limited time offer, please upgrade your MIDAS system today!

If maintaining 24/7/365 access to your room booking and resource scheduling information is paramount to your operations, you should certainly consider this optional add-on for your remotely hosted MIDAS system!

New customers can add the Emergency Access addon to their “remotely hosted” MIDAS system at time of purchase, or at a later date.


* Prices correct at time of writing, but may vary slightly day-to-day due to fluctuations in global currency exchange rates. Current pricing may be viewed here for existing customers, or here for new customers

** Offer ends 23:59 UTC on Sunday 5th April 2015 – EXTENDED UNTIL 30th APRIL!!

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Earth Hour 2015 – We’re doing it again!

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March 27, 2015
Earth Hour 2015

For the past couple of years, we’ve been proud to be part of “Earth Hour“. Each year, millions of people across the world switch off lights for a whole 60 minutes to raise awareness of climate change.

This annual event first began in 2007. It is now a global event marked in more than 162 countries and territories worldwide. Organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), its purpose is to encourage individuals, communities, households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights for one hour as a symbol of their commitment to our planet through a symbolic reduction in their energy consumption.

We are once again very happy to be supporting this year’s effort which takes place on Saturday 28th March between 8.30pm-9.30pm in whatever timezone you’re in!

Now, as you can probably appreciate, running a global web-based business like MIDAS consumes a fair amount of energy to keep our infrastructure up and running year-on-year.

At the same time, we take our environmental responsibilities very seriously! We’ve already invested in servers with extremely low power consumption. In fact, some of our administrative servers draw as little as 18w of power! We have also now replaced traditional mechanical hard drives in virtually all of our public-facing servers with newer, faster, yet more energy efficient Solid State Drives (SSDs). Within the next few months ALL our public-facing servers will be running with SSDs in them!

We also work hard in the development of our MIDAS software itself to optimize its disk, memory, and CPU usage. Factors which all in turn help to reduce the amount of power consumption on servers running MIDAS (whether that’s on our cloud servers for our “hosted” customers, or on our “self hosted” customer’s own servers)

We believe that everyone, not just individuals but other web & cloud based businesses like ours, can reduce their energy footprint and show they care about our planet. That’s why at 8.30pm (UTC, as we’re based in the UK) on Saturday, we’ll once again be joining in with “Earth Hour”. We’ll be switching off non-essential systems – not just our lights – for 1 hour.

Note: This will not affect access to our main website, or prevent our “hosted” customers from accessing their MIDAS booking systems during this period. However our non-essential administrative systems will be shut down for 60 minutes, which may lead to a slight delay in responses to emails received during this period, etc.

So go on, make a difference and support Earth Hour with us at 8.30pm on Saturday wherever you are in the world!

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We’re 9 years old today!

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March 11, 2015

Happy 9th Birthday, MIDAS!We’re celebrating a birthday today – ours! Yes, it’s been 9 years to the day since the very first version of MIDAS was publicly released back on 11th March 2006. Since then our software has grown and developed to become a leading world-class web based booking and scheduling system which is trusted by organizations of all sizes and types around the globe!

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our customers – whether you’ve been with us just a short time, or been with us since the beginning! We love seeing the joy our software brings to customers and how it helps makes their lives and facilities administration easier!

Some of the important factors customers carefully consider when looking for a potential new room booking system for their venue is how long has it been around? ..and how often is it updated?

Whilst there are a handful of other room booking systems that have been around longer than ours, the majority of these are no longer maintained/updated. We’ve been around now for nine years, and our software remains in active development today!

So, if you’re not yet a customer, but are looking for a new room booking system for your venue, one that’s regularly updated with new features, and one backed by a proven track record of outstanding customer service for the past 9 years – then look no further than MIDAS!